


a Soviet fairytale

by Naraht



Series: Lilia & Yakov [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 1960s, Abortion, Age Difference, Antisemitism, Anxiety, Ballet, Coming of Age, Courtship, Early marriage, F/M, Jewish Characters, Minor Character Death, Moscow, Political Repression, Soviet Union, Wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2019-09-22 10:57:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17058503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: When a teenage Lilia Baranovskaya fell in love with the Olympic champion Yakov Feltsman, the result was a Soviet fairytale.With everything that implied.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story draws from a few different sources. While I was reading _The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin's Russia_ , and particularly the chapter about the aftermath of the Stalin era, I found myself wondering what happened in Lilia's past that led her to believe that "people who can be reborn as many times as necessary are the strong ones." I also took some inspiration from Maya Plisetskaya's biography.
> 
> Via Google Translate, I was also inspired by some of the Russian fandom's takes on Lilia and Yakov. '[Sylphide](https://archiveofourown.org/series/980205)' by LolaRose is fantastic. And I was struck by a line in '[How could I?](https://ficbook.net/readfic/6266814)' by Bazhyk where Lilia looks at Mila and reflects on herself at nineteen.
> 
> This story follows a different timeline than some of my other Yakov/Lilia stories, which have Lilia starting her dancing career in the early eighties rather than the late sixties. Thankfully Lilia's age isn't canonical, so it's certainly possible that she was born during the Stalin era. Even though this story is set in a different period than '[the Master and Margarita](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9814388),' it basically follows on from the story of their meeting as told there.

**1958**

Lilia Baranovskaya was born in Yekaterinburg, three years before Stalin died. Her father was sent to the camps when she was still a baby; she was just old enough to remember her mother being taken away. 

After six months living with her elderly grandmother, her aunt came to Yekaterinburg to take her on the train to Moscow. Aunt Raisa, her father's sister, was a ballet teacher. 

A few years later, when Lilia entered the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, her aunt put down her own name in the space on the form that said _mother_ , lest Lilia's ballet career be hindered by the fact that she was a daughter of enemies of the people.


	2. Chapter 2

**1968**

Nineteen years old and the newest member of the Bolshoi _corps de ballet_. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a passageway beside the theatre with four other members of the _corps_. Because she was the youngest, she had to share a room with two of them.

Back in the Academy she hadn't been well liked. The other girls had called her cold, snobbish, standoffish. They'd said she thought she was better than everyone else. It had been difficult to argue with that, because it was true. Now, one of only three students in her year to graduate into the Bolshoi Ballet, she was the new girl. In her opinion, whatever that was worth, she was still better than most of the _corps de ballet_. And she was still disliked.

She had always lacked the talent for easy banter and cameraderie that so many of her fellow dancers seemed to possess in abundance. She would sit in the dancers' rest area watching them laugh and gossip and tease one another, always a little bit apart from the others however hard she tried. Lilia didn't care; she told herself she didn't care. 

_If they can't like me,_ she thought, _they can envy me. And someday they can be afraid of me._

It wasn't as if she was unattractive. She was no fool; without false pride, she knew perfectly well that the truth was otherwise. And it wasn't as if she was inexperienced: she'd had two lovers since joining the Bolshoi, no doubt two more than a good unmarried Soviet girl ought to have had at nineteen. (Unless she was serving the Motherland by bending to the desires of some ballet-loving bureaucrat from the _nomenklatura_ , which she knew did happen, although it had not yet happened to her.)

She had been unable to bear the thought that there was a grand physical experience that others had had and she had not. She had wanted to know what it was like, whether it would quell the longings that sometimes tormented her. So she had taken the opportunities that presented themselves.

The first was Artyom, who had joined the Bolshoi _corps de ballet_ alongside her at the beginning of the season. He was from the Perm State Choreographic College, and he was good – because you had to be good if anyone was going to notice you in Perm. It went without saying that he knew no one at the Bolshoi. And so, almost inevitably, they drifted into the same orbit: sitting at the same table in the cafeteria, walking to and from morning class together. They were outsiders together. And so when he began to make the first tentative steps towards seduction, she surprised him by her willingness to be seduced.

It lasted for several months, nothing more than a series of snatched moments in their busy schedules. It ended without ceremony one afternoon, when she was sewing ribbons onto a new pair of pointe shoes. He dropped a pair of his leggings into her lap.

"What do you expect me to do with _these_?" said Lilia, picking them up with thumb and forefinger and dropping them on the floor.

"They're ripped at the seam there." He paused, seeing the face she was making. "You're sewing already, aren't you? Can't you just..."

"No," said Lilia. "Why should I?"

"The other girls do it for their boyfriends."

Lilia could have given him a Komsomol-style lecture about the dignity of labour and how men had a duty to respect women as equal comrades in the struggle to build socialism. But to tell the truth was far simpler.

"You're not my boyfriend," she said.

That was the end of Artyom, apart from the wounded looks he gave her across the studio for months afterwards. And the gossip he spread around the _corps de ballet_ about what a bitch she was.

***

Her second lover was completely different. He was a man, not a boy. He was Yakov Davidovich Feltsman, the Olympic figure skating champion. She had met him at a glittering official reception to which she had been sent with a few other members of the _corps de ballet_. They started talking over the buffet; they slipped away together to a rooftop terrace; and nature took its course. Unlike Artyom, unlike her, Yakov had known exactly what he was doing. Her body had sung with every touch, an instrument played by a master. And they had barely had the time to say goodbye.

For weeks afterwards she lived off the memory of that one evening, delighting and torturing herself by turns as she lay in her narrow bed at night. Alongside the ecstasy she remembered every awkward silence, every clumsy remark that had fallen from her lips. Years and years of practice in the ballet studio had taught her nothing about how to make graceful, charming conversation at an official reception with a Master of Sport of the Soviet Union. So in the end she had let her body speak for her.

 _Why were you so cold?_ she reproached herself. _Why didn't you say more, compliment him more? A man like that, girls would do anything for him. All you could do was insult him and then show off how wide you could spread your legs. What must he have thought of you?_

But it didn't matter, because she would probably never see him again. At the end of the evening he had gone back to Leningrad, where he trained, and no doubt he hadn't given her another thought.

That didn't stop Lilia from thinking about him.

If it had been during the competitive season she could have watched him on television, followed his victories in the newspapers. But it was already spring and there was no skating to watch. She racked her brain trying to remember whether she had actually seen him competing during the Olympics, but all she could bring to mind was Peggy Fleming's vivid chartreuse minidress and the energy of her jumps. She had never paid much attention to men's singles.

For weeks she sustained herself with nothing but the castles her imagination could build on the foundation of memory. Then an idea occurred to her. On her next free afternoon she took herself to the library. 

Twenty minutes later a librarian was handing her a back issue of _Ogoniok_. February 1968, no 9. She had been afraid that someone might have stolen it. The cover was devoted to a moodily lit, red backgrounded photograph of a man carrying a rifle on his back. Lilia accepted the magazine and took it with her to a desk.

The lead article – _FORWARD TO SAPPORO_ – was introduced with a two-page spread of the hockey team. _Continued on page 6._ Lilia flipped forwards impatiently. On page 6 there was a picture of a ski jumper, and another of Zhuk and Gorelik performing a death spiral. That she did remember watching. _He's Jewish,_ her aunt had said, studying the television closely over a cup of tea as if she could discern his ethnicity through the fuzz in the picture.

And on page 7... there he was in black and white, a quarter-page photograph of his closing pose on the ice. The caption was simple: _Olympic bronze medalist Yakov Feltsman._ Lilia rested her chin on her hands and stared down at the image, leaning closer and closer until his smiling face dissolved, uncapturable, into a blur of halftone dots. He wore a dark suit that, by the standards of a ballet dancer, revealed little. But what the photograph did capture was the sweep of his arms, the line of his body, graceful even in its evident strength. It was glorious.

Not only could she not possess the man; she couldn't even possess the photograph. She thought of trying to smuggle the magazine out of the library in her bag, or quietly ripping out the page and tucking it underneath her shirt. But she was surrounded by other readers, and under the watchful, pitiless eyes of the librarians. Heaven only knew what they did to citizens who were caught defacing the property of the V. I. Lenin State Library of the USSR. She shivered; she didn't want to find out.

So she studied the photograph for as long as she could, hoping to engrave it into her memory. Then, when the clock struck the hour, she closed the magazine and obediently handed it in at the desk.

***

Most days she had little enough free time to do anything other than have a cup of tea in the Bolshoi canteen. As a member of the _corps de ballet_ , between morning class and rehearsals and stage calls and performances, she sometimes spent eight or nine hours a day in pointe shoes. Everything was new to her, all the old warhorses that the veterans of the _corps_ could have danced in their sleep.

" _Swan Lake_ again," sighed Masha before the dress rehearsal. She was thirty and would never get further than the _corps_. "Brezhnev must be as tired of it as we are. Poor soul!"

Lilia had been busy admiring her halo of feathers in the mirror, putting in a few more hairpins for safety's sake. (Her hair was thick and heavy; it had pulled itself out of buns before.) But she felt a chill when she heard Masha's casual words. She didn't turn around, only gave her a glancing look in the mirror.

From the audience you might think that ballet dancers spent their days thinking of nothing but art and beauty. In fact, behind the curtain the Bolshoi Theatre ran on coffee and cigarettes, hatred, and relentless, pitiless gossip. Who was injured, who was getting fat, who was out of favor, who was sleeping with whom. Who was deserving, who was undeserving. 

All of it was politics, the petty politics of the theatre, but some of it was truly political: who had joined the Party, who was banned from travelling abroad on tour, what productions the Director and the Minister of Culture considered too scandalous or too subversive to be put onstage. 

People like Masha might laugh and joke about it all and come to no harm. Lilia never dared. When Brezhnev was in the audience, or when they danced at the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin, she was terrified that eyes would be drawn to her, that everyone would somehow know she was a daughter of enemies of the people, even if she was only the fifth swan from the right. 

Unlike Masha, she would not be hiding for long in the anonymity of the _corps_. Even in her very first _Swan Lake_ , she had been cast as one of the Prince's Friends in Act I. Her name was there in the programme beside Nastya's. Soon – she dreamed, she hoped, she trusted – it would be written on the posters instead, and people would buy their tickets 'for Baranovskaya.'

All she had to do was work harder than anyone else, be better than anyone else, be so good that no one would care who her parents were. Be so good that she was untouchable. People would look. People would know her name – not just in Moscow, not just in the Soviet Union, but all across the world. She was determined that they would. And yet still she was terrified.

She worked so that she wouldn't be afraid. She worked so that she wouldn't have to think about anything but work. Even thoughts of Yakov Feltsman evaporated when she fell into bed at midnight after a performance, aching in every muscle and exhausted to the bone. It was, she decided, far easier to have no life outside of her dancing. Artyom had been a mistake; Yakov she would never see again, and there was no point in longing for something that she couldn't have. So she would have neither him nor anyone else. It was better this way: no lovers, no distractions, nothing but work. 

Not everyone lived by the same code. When not performing, her four flatmates gathered around the tiny kitchen table and gossiped incessantly about their fellow dancers.

"Did you see him today? Did you see that double revoltade in morning class?"

"Misha is better."

"No he isn't. And isn't he back with Dasha? I'm sure I saw them..."

"He's such a flirt!"

"I like a flirt," finished Nastya conclusively. Nastya also liked the last word.

Liza prodded Lilia with her foot under the table. "What about you, Lil?"

"Hmm?" said Lilia, looking up from the pages of _Komsomolskaya Pravda_ and doing her best to pretend that she hadn't been listening.

"Misha or Grisha?"

"Neither," said Lilia, which was the absolute truth.

She went back to the newspaper. Although she wasn't interested in politics, she had been idly looking at an article about the American Presidential nomination. Or at least at the photograph underneath it.

Struck by inspiration, she added: "Maybe Robert Kennedy."

Nastya laughed, but not in a nice way. "No one is good enough for our Lil'ka."

"Our Lil'ka," said Masha, "is waiting to be swept off her feet by an old Party official with a driver and a _dacha_ in Zhukovka and a four-room apartment in the House of Government. But he won't look like Robert Kennedy."

"Maybe that's what _you_ were waiting for, Masha," said Lilia. "But clearly it never happened."

Masha's mouth snapped shut; spots of red burned in her rough cheeks.

"And I'm not waiting for anyone," Lilia added.

It was a lie. It was half the truth. Either way, it certainly didn't endear her to Masha.

***

A few weeks later Robert Kennedy was dead. And Lilia was preparing a new pair of pointe shoes, banging them as hard as she could on the kitchen table to soften up the blocks. _That_ to everyone who said that she shouldn't have been cast in _Swan Lake_ because she wasn't a soloist yet (she deserved it). _That_ to Grisha, who said she was too fat to lift (it was utterly untrue and he knew it). _That_ to whoever had shot Kennedy (she had read Yevtushenko's poem and she had cried).

"They'll be half dead by the time you put them on," said Nastya, who was doing the dishes.

"I don't intend to hobble around for hours and get blisters just to make them last a bit longer," replied Lilia, who was willing to brave the wrath of the shoe supervisor if it made her life easier. The others were just cowards. She gave the shoe another whack on the table to express her disdain.

Nastya just sighed, shrugged and turned back to the dishes.

That was when the telephone rang. Everything stopped. The other girls looked up from their cups of tea and Masha leapt to her feet and ran to the hallway to answer it.

They didn't get very many phone calls. The telephone had only been installed so that the ballet company could summon an understudy without needing to send someone running across the square. And this was the time of day when an understudy might well be needed. So they all paused and listened, wondering who was injured, wondering whether one of them might find herself on stage tonight.

"Oh!" said Masha. "Yes, she's here."

A silence. She leaned around the edge of the door, phone still in hand, balanced against a pointed toe.

"Lil, it's for you. It's an intercity call – from Leningrad!"

Everyone looked at Lilia curiously, because they knew enough about her to know that she had no family apart from her mother in Ostankinsky.

"I don't know anyone in Leningrad," said Lilia, her heart beginning to thump with a painful, foolish anticipation despite her denial.

"He says he's called Yakov Davidovich."

"All right," said Lilia.

She rose carefully from her chair. It was as if she were taking the graduation exam for her acting class at the Academy again, this time dancing a piece entitled _Girl Takes A Perfectly Ordinary Telephone Call._

She took the telephone receiver from Masha and retreated back into the hallway with it, stretching the cord as far as possible so that she could stand in the doorway of her own room. It was no use: there was nowhere in the apartment that you could talk on the telephone in private, and she knew it.

"Hello?" she said. "This is Lilia."

A sound of a throat being cleared. "I hope you'll forgive me for presuming to call you. We met at a reception in March, at Pashkov House."

"I remember," said Lilia.

Then she cursed herself for a fool. Why had she said that? What sort of idiot wouldn't remember that night – remember _him_?

"Good," said Yakov. "Because I certainly haven't forgotten."

"How did you get my number?"

"I called the Bolshoi Stage Door and refused to take no for an answer until they told me how I could reach you."

"Oh."

A silence. The crackle of the line. Not a noise from her flatmates in the kitchen; no doubt they were eavesdropping.

Although he must have known already, Lilia added, half against her will: "I'm glad."

Another silence. She could hear the sound of his breath against the receiver, four hundred miles away in Leningrad.

"I'm coming to Moscow next week," he said. "They're letting me visit my family before I go to training camp in Ukraine. Three days, only I have to fly out on the afternoon of the last day."

Lilia still went to see her aunt, who lived in a northern suburb, every two weeks for tea. This was more out of a sense of duty than affection. It was also beside the point.

"Oh," she said again.

"And I wondered if, if you – would you let me take you to dinner while I'm here?"

"Yes. Of course. I... I would like that."

"Good! Great. On Thursday? I'll come and meet you."

"On the steps of the Bolshoi," said Lilia, who didn't want him coming to her communal apartment and facing the scrutiny of all the other girls. "That will be simplest."

That was when the operator cut in to say that their time was up.

"Seven o'clock?" said Yakov, raising his voice over her. "On Thursday. I'll see you next week."

And that was his farewell. He hung up the phone. Lilia stood for a moment with the receiver still in her hand, wondering whether it was possible to hallucinate a whole telephone call. Then she hung up the phone and wiped a damp hand on her skirt. 

She walked back into the kitchen and sat down mechanically at the kitchen table. Picking up one of her pointe shoes and squeezing its block in her hand, she pondered: perhaps it was just flexible enough now.

Masha leaned towards her. "So, who was that calling you from Leningrad?"

"My second cousin," said Lilia. 

Nastya protested: "But you said you didn't know anyone there!"

"Oh," said Lilia, lying easily, "he's in the Baltic Fleet."


	3. Chapter 3

Lilia knew exactly what she was going to wear to dinner. Earlier in the year she'd obtained some truly amazing pale green paisley fabric, a polyester mix, from a woman in the costume department who had bought it back from a tour in East Germany and said it was what everyone was wearing in the west. She would say that, because she was reselling it at what must have been an extraordinary markup.

Nonetheless, Lilia, giddy with her minuscule but glorious new salary from the Bolshoi, had bought some of the fabric. From this she had sewn herself a minidress, as short as she thought she could get away with without actually outraging public decency. After all, why should she be ashamed of her legs?

So she had thought. Nonetheless she had rarely worn the minidress, because it turned out that every woman at the Bolshoi (and she ought to have anticipated this) suddenly had a dress made of the same fabric. It wasn't as if she was going to wear it to tea with her aunt, and where else did she go?

'To dinner with Yakov Feltsman' was the answer. It must have been fate. The dress even reminded her a little of the skating dress that Peggy Fleming had worn during her long program at the Olympics.

It was her hair that was the challenge. Alone in her empty apartment (the other girls were all at a Komsomol meeting), she brushed it out to its full length, which was a challenge in itself. Then she spent half an hour winding it carefully around her head into an elaborate beehive. Finished, she studied herself in the mirror. It did look glamorous but also a bit... staid? Formal? Old? Maybe she was trying too hard.

Lilia pulled all the pins out of her hair and let it down again. Then she put it into a bun, albeit something a little more sophisticated than what she normally wore to morning class. It still made her look as if she thought of nothing but ballet.

After that she tried two long braids. This just made her look like a schoolgirl.

Finally, in desperation, she parted it carefully in the middle and brushed it all out again. With her hair cascading loose over her shoulders and halfway down her back, she stared at herself in the mirror. Since she was a little girl at the academy she had always been required to wear her hair up. Leaving it down like this just made her feel... undressed. On the other hand, in this context, was that really such a bad thing?

Lilia glanced at her watch. Only five minutes left. Well, shockingly informal or not, it would have to do. She gave her hair a few more strokes of the brush and then dashed out the door, her hair flying behind her.

She arrived at the grand front steps of the Bolshoi just as the clocks were striking seven. It was a hot day, very hot. Even in the lowering sun, she felt herself growing damp with sweat, but this didn't bother her. Her whole life was made of sweat.

No sign of Yakov on Theater Square, only a tour group being herded off of a bus. Possibly they were Westerners, because they had Intourist minders sticking close beside them. Lilia combed her fingers through her hair, leaned against one of the columns of the theater and tried to look casual. One of the tourists was surreptitiously taking her picture. Lilia was amused at the thought that she might appear in some Western photograph album: a stylish young Muscovite. Good. They should know that not all Soviet women wore workers' overalls or a headscarf tied under their chin.

Yakov took her eye from the tourists. He walked quickly across the square on the diagonal, coming unerringly towards her. At the steps he stopped, looking slightly up at her. His light brown hair, a little long, was casually disarranged. A stray strand fluttered in the breeze. His eyes were blue, which she had failed to notice last time. He was wearing a suit – a very nice one, well cut, maybe Western. He was, she thought, one of the most handsome men she'd ever seen.

"Lilia," he said. "You look amazing."

"So do you," she said, struck suddenly shy – and realising that she had just addressed him formally because she was afraid of using the familiar.

Her heart was fluttering as if she were standing not on the steps of the Bolshoi but on the stage of the theatre, preparing herself to launch into the first steps of a solo. 

"You'll make me feel ancient!" he said. "Shouldn't we call each other _ty_?"

"If you like," she said, and then added: "Yasha."

He beamed. "I made reservations at Aragvi. I hope that's all right. It's not too far from here."

***

Outside the restaurant, Yakov caught her elbow and stopped her where she stood. He nodded towards the door. "Do you know about Aragvi?"

It was one of the most prestigious restaurants in Moscow. She would have been happy if he had taken her on a picnic with a loaf of rye bread, a sausage and a little lump of cheese. For a moment she thought he was going to say it had all been a hideous misunderstanding, that he couldn't possibly take her out to dinner after all. 

"I've heard of it," she said cautiously.

"The food is amazing." He dropped his voice. "And my coach tells me there's always someone listening."

Even Lilia knew about hidden microphones. The gossip at the Bolshoi was that Aragvi was a favorite haunt of the KGB, who apparently liked Georgian food as much as everyone else. So in reply she only shrugged. She always assumed that someone was listening – someone who hated her. Most of the time it was true.

"As long as you know," said Yakov. "That's all."

He offered her his arm and led her into the restaurant. There were chandeliers, long tables set magnificently for banqueting, murals on the walls in good Socialist realist style illustrating the richness of Georgian agriculture. There was a clatter of cutlery and voices raised in hearty conversation. Men mostly. Men in suits. Important men.

As the waiter led them to their table, Lilia attempted to act as if all this grandeur were no more than she expected out of life. Allowing her gaze to drift across deniably across the faces of the other diners, she thought she recognized a cosmonaut and an actor from the Moscow Art Theater. In turn they were looking at her, rather more openly – it was, of course, the minidress. (In years to come, she would remember it as the first and last time she had gone to Aragvi without being recognised in her own right.)

They were seated at a table for two, set a little apart from the rest of the room. Yakov ordered a magnificent spread of food: khachapuri, veal tongue with horseradish, chicken livers, dolma, grilled chicken with nuts and garlic, lamb shashlik – and of course Georgian wine, plenty of wine. Together it would probably cost more than her meagre weekly wage. 

And once it arrived, Yakov mainly restricted himself to the grilled chicken.

"I'm on a diet," he confessed, chewing ruefully. "For the start of the season. But you..."

"I'm starving," confessed Lilia in exchange, sliding cubes of shashlik off the skewer one by one onto her plate. "I've been dancing all day. Are you sure you don't want some of this?"

"Maybe just a small piece," said Yakov.

While she was helping herself to the chicken livers, she looked him up and down. Maybe he was a little heavier than when she'd seen him in March, just after the Olympics. It didn't show in his face but you could see the slightest curve of a belly above his belt. It suited him, although it might not suit his skating.

He caught her eyes and smiled at her. "In case you wondered, I'm going bald too."

"Only a little," said Lilia, then felt the blush rise to her face. Why was she always saying things like this? It was like a compulsion. Really she wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't said anything; it looked like just he had a high forehead.

He ran his hand thoughtfully through his hair, but even her tactlessness couldn't entirely erase a half smile from his eyes. He looked at her; she looked back at him. Her breath caught. The room seemed very warm. She dropped her gaze and occupied herself with cutting up her shashlik. For a long while they ate almost in silence; the food was so good that it would have been a sin not to give it their full attention. 

And they glanced at one another, from time to time, as if they could also eat with their eyes.

Did they talk at all? Of course they did. They must have talked, even if you could hardly have called it a grand intellectual seduction. All Lilia could remember of their conversation in years to come was listening to Yakov earnestly going through his schedule of competitions for the year – and then reciprocating with a full list of the productions in which she would be dancing in the _corps_ , and those in which she had been named as an understudy. 

"I try not to hope that someone will be injured," she confessed at the end of her recitation.

Yakov snorted with laughter. "But you do, don't you?"

"Of course I do."

He wiped his mouth; his laughter had left a smudge of garlic at one corner of his lips. "Well – everyone does."

"No one else ever admits it though. That's why people call me a bitch."

He looked at her in surprise. "You're not a bitch at all."

"You just don't know me well enough."

"Well, I'd like to," said Yakov stubbornly. "I'd like to know you better."

Unconsciously Lilia shook her head. She couldn't see how on earth it was possible. She danced in Moscow and he trained in Leningrad. That they had succeeded in meeting a second time was nothing short of a miracle. To ask anything more of life, to hope for anything more, was to misunderstand the nature of fate. Fate didn't give; it took. You could only hope to snatch what you could while it was looking the other way.

From the way that Yakov was looking at her, she guessed that he had misunderstood the meaning of her shake of the head.

"If only!" she said hurriedly. "But we, we..."

Only a gesture could she express the impossible distance that she felt between them. She spread her hands wide, then apologized to the waiter who was passing their table carrying a brimming basin of borsht.

"For now!" said Yakov. "But I'll retire soon – they'll let me retire soon. Maybe at the end of this season, or next season. No one is in any hurry! But when I do, I'll be more free. I'd like to come back to Moscow to get my certification at the State Academy of Physical Culture. And then get distribution, get assigned somewhere. Maybe if I play my cards right I'll be able to stay here."

 _So this is our freedom,_ thought Lilia. _That if he's lucky, the Federation of Figure Skating might let him stay in Moscow._ But she didn't say this, because someone was always listening.

"What will you do?" she asked instead.

"Work as a coach for Dynamo or CSKA, if I'm lucky. Oleg Petrovich keeps dropping hints."

Lilia looked at him in awe. She was not even a year out of her student days; he was already a champion, already knowledgable enough to be in demand as a teacher. The idea seemed as remote as the moon. It made him seem even more Olympian than he did already.

"I don't know what he's thinking," Yakov grumbled, picking idly at the khachapuri. "He knows what I'm like. Being a decent skater doesn't make a coach. You have to have more than that. Patience, insight, diplomacy..."

"None of my ballet teachers had any patience," said Lilia.

"Well, neither does Oleg Petrovich. But that's different. And he does know how to work the system."

Lilia glanced around the crowded restaurant, full of the Soviet elite. She thought that Yakov probably understood the system better than he thought he did. 

"That's important too," she acknowledged.

Yakov sighed. "We'll see, I guess. Are you going to eat the rest of the dolma?" 

"No, go ahead."

As the evening wore on, the restaurant became livelier and livelier. Now it was almost too noisy to talk comfortably, which in a way was a relief to Lilia. Other conversations had become louder and more convivial as the drinking progressed. A group of men in suits were cheering and hammering on their table with each new toast. A few musicians had emerged – an accordionist, flautist, guitarist and a drummer – and begun their work, with a pair of female dancers in traditional Georgian dress making their way between the tables.

Lilia couldn't stop her toes from tapping. The music was infectious – far more appealing than Georgian music had seemed played on a piano by a bored _répétiteur_ back in character dance classes at the academy. Nonetheless she had won a distinction for her examination in character dance. (Afterwards a fellow student had said, both unkindly and unfairly, that she had traded on her exotic looks. As if being a Lithuanian Jew was all that exotic.)

Yakov poured her more wine; Lilia drank it and looked enviously at the dancers. They were not bad at all. Probably they were moonlighting from the Igor Moiseyev Ballet, just like she and the rest of the Bolshoi fit in concert performances around Moscow to earn a little extra money. She half wished that she were dancing tonight. It would be simpler than trying to hold up her end of the conversation. 

Reaching into an inner pocket of his jacket, Yakov pulled out a packet of Opals. "Cigarette?"

"Yes, please."

Lilia was glad that she'd borrowed a few cigarettes here and there from the other corps de ballet girls. Unlike most of them, she wasn't really worried about her weight, but she hadn't wanted to be left out. Nor did she want to be left out now. Nothing could be worse than the thought of looking unsophisticated in front of Yakov.

After leaning forward to let him light her cigarette, she drew a careful, cautious breath. The taste wasn't so terrible. It had been worse the first time she'd tried smoking. She exhaled slowly, grateful that she was practiced at controlling both her expression and her breathing. Meanwhile Yakov was smoking with the casual ease of habit.

Watching the dancers, Lilia found herself taking in the steps without even thinking, feeling the rhythm settling into her body. One of the women smiled down at her and flourished a hand in invitation. Lilia shook her head.

Another flourish, showier this time. "Come on, you want to. Give it a try."

Now everyone was looking in their direction. All those men sitting at the banquet tables. One of them clapped his encouragement, clearly hoping for a little extra entertainment. 

_They don't have any idea who I am,_ thought Lilia. _I could show them all._

Her pride was almost enough to drive her to her feet. But one of the men, a different man, shouted drunken encouragement, and Lilia shivered inwardly.

She shook her head again. "No," she said firmly.

"She doesn't want to," said Yakov.

And that was the end of the matter. He signaled discreetly for the bill.

***

Outside the air was fresh with rain. The pavements were still wet from an earlier cloudburst but the sky was clearing in the west, the sunset piling up pink and gold. Only a few people were left on the streets, making their way home. It was still shockingly warm, even at that hour – it was nearly ten o'clock. 

"You looked like you wanted to dance," said Yakov, lighting another cigarette. She shook her head when he held the pack out to her. "In there."

"I did."

"So why didn't you?"

"I didn't want to dance for _them_."

Yakov made a grunt of acknowledgment. She thought he understood. 

"I wouldn't mind dancing for _you_ ," she added, in case she hadn't been clear.

"It's a shame we don't have an orchestra at our disposal," he replied, looking around as if he hoped to see a conductor in full evening dress stepping off a bus. "Or even a pianist."

Lilia laughed. 

Yakov looked at her. "Would you like me to take you dancing? We might be able to find somewhere, if it's not too late..."

It was tempting – and yet not tempting at all. Without knowing anyone who was throwing a party, the best they would be able to do would be some Komsomol youth dance: all pimply, nervous boys and lumpen, hopeful girls awkwardly dancing the foxtrot together, praying that perhaps the band would slip a Western song or two into the program before the end of the evening. She didn't want that. She didn't want to share him, not even with envious onlookers. She wanted to have Yakov Feltsman all to herself, if only for one night.

"It's such a beautiful evening," she said. He seemed to know what she meant. 

Theatre Square was thronged at that hour: people streaming out of the Bolshoi after a performance of _Spartacus_ , in which Lilia hadn't been cast. Masha and Liza would be in the dressing room, wiping off their makeup and stripping off their costumes. Soon they would be back in the apartment and wondering where on earth she had gone.

Yakov was close by her side, not quite touching. Lilia held her breath for a moment, thinking that he might wish her goodnight – kiss her, perhaps, if she were lucky. He did nothing of the sort. Without saying anything to one another, they kept walking, across Okhotny Ryad and through Revolution Square.

It was Lilia who finally broke the silence, asking what seemed like the simplest question. 

"So you're going to keep competing next season?" 

"It looks like it," answered Yakov gruffly.

For a little while she thought that this was all he was going to say. She bit her lip, wondering if she had misspoken.

"I'm twenty-eight," he added finally. "You would think that would be old enough for an athlete to be allowed to retire."

A ballet dancer would still be in his prime at twenty-eight. Nonetheless, to Lilia it seemed a geological age beyond nineteen.

"You would think!" Yakov repeated, warming to his theme. "You would think that a medal at the Olympics would be good enough for anyone. But no. Apparently it's not a good enough showing to be awarded the Honored Master of Sport. And it's too good a showing to retire, when you could be _holding high the banner of Soviet sport_."

From the way he phrased his final words, she could envision them blazoned across a propaganda banner in a sports arena somewhere. 

"It's never good enough to be good," said Lilia. "You always have to be better."

It was the truth around which her life revolved. She paused, wondering whether she dared to put into words its implicit corollary. Yes, she did. She did.

"Especially if you're a Jew," she added quietly.

"Yes," said Yakov, matching her tone. "Yes, exactly."

Something in her heart untwisted a little at his open acknowledgment of the fact. Not that there was any hiding with a name like _Yakov Feltsman_. Not that there was any hiding anyway. Her aunt had a sixth sense for Jews, even those who were scarcely aware of being Jews themselves.

At the corner of the State Historical Museum they stopped and looked towards Red Square. The domes of St Basil's were warm with the last light of sunset, but the vast square itself was shadowed, dim and deserted. Lilia shivered a little, although it was not a cold night. They didn't walk that way, but turned and went into the Alexander Gardens. Obeying some shared inner impulse, they stopped for a moment by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, watching the eternal flame flickering in the dusk. Then they walked on.

"Sergei Alexandrovich has his Honored Master of Sport," continued Yakov a little while afterwards, as if the conversation had never stopped. "Stanislav Alekseevich has his. Tamara Nikolayevna has hers. Is it perhaps that I lack the right _attitude_ to be worthy of such an honor? That's what my coach always says: _Yasha, if you were to demonstrate an attitude more befitting a Soviet sportsman, maybe the authorities would be better disposed..._ "

"No," interrupted Lilia, "it's just that they're all fools."

She might never have seen him skate – and she was selfishly glad he wasn't retiring now, because she wanted to have the chance – but she knew without a doubt whose side she was on.

Yakov laughed, a hearty, ringing tone. "Yes," he said, "that's what it is. You've put your finger on it. They're all fools. I'm glad we've sorted that out."

Lilia gave him a sidelong look, wondering whether he was making fun of her. But she wasn't sure he was.

"Still, I don't think I'd ever want to retire," she said. "It would take a lifetime just to dance _Swan Lake_ perfectly, and then, then..."

"You'll feel differently when you wake up hurting every morning."

"I do hurt every morning!" objected Lilia. It wasn't a lie. How dare he suggest that she went easy on herself? Or that the Bolshoi went easy on her? She was in pointe shoes seven or eight hours a day sometimes. Was that not enough for him?

"Not the way you will when you're twenty-eight," said Yakov.

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Tell me that in ten years."

Lilia fell silent, because she didn't expect Yakov Feltsman would be saying anything to her in ten years. Nor could she think that he expected it either. It was just a figure of speech; it seemed to her a cruel one.

"Would you like to try dancing Balanchine someday?" asked Yakov, a conversational olive branch.

"Maybe," said Lilia. This probably sounded too equivocal. "Maybe!" she said, more warmly.

How would she know for certain? And how would she know whether she would be able to dance it well? This was why she had to travel overseas – to find out whether she had been left behind, at nineteen, without even realising it, or whether Russian ballet was truly the best in the world. Balanchine's company had come to the USSR when she was a little girl at the academy. Although he had visited the academy, and met their teachers, there were no tickets available for the ballet students. So they had pored over the reviews in _Pravda_ and _Sovietskaya Kultura_ , arguing fiercely about how to read between the lines of every turgid sentence.

"I saw the _New York City Ballet_ when they came to Leningrad," said Yakov. He pronounced the name of the company just like an American would. "It was 1962, I think."

"Did you? Really?"

"I would have gone every night if I could. It was really athletic, their technique. Very quick, very energetic. And the girls were beautiful, all long and lean – like you."

He failed to notice the effect that this offhand comment had on Lilia – who had spent most of her time at the academy drinking coffee by the liter in the hopes that it would stop her from growing too tall – because he was still immersed in his memories of Balanchine's company.

Unable to resist, Lilia asked tentatively, uncertain whether she wanted to know the answer: "Do you think it's better than our Russian ballet? What the Americans do?"

Yakov shrugged. "Different. They do what they like. But they lack emotion."

Lilia felt the urge to tease him. "And Western figure skating?"

"Of course our Soviet figure skating is the best in the world!"

After a heartbeat or two she realised that he, with a perfectly straight face, was speaking tongue in cheek. Despite herself she found a smile playing about her lips. She tried sternly to suppress it.

"We haven't once won gold at the Olympics in singles," he grumbled. "Or at the World Championships. If it weren't for pairs, we'd have nothing. What is bronze? A consolation prize."

Although she was amused by him, some part of her didn't like to hear that her country was inferior in any way. After all, his 'consolation prize,' his bronze medal, was a landmark for Soviet men's figure skating.

"It seems unjust, doesn't it?" she said. "Maybe the Western judges are biased against our Socialist sportsmen and women."

"Maybe," he replied, but he didn't really seem to believe it.

On the embankment of the Moskva River, night was falling and there was no one around, only the passing headlights of cars. The lights of the city were golden against the dark water. And Yakov had started telling political jokes.

"So, Radio Yerevan was asked: _Does one get ten years in prison for saying that Brezhnev is an idiot?_ " 

Lilia giggled in anticipation. "And what did they answer?"

"Radio Yerevan answered, _In principle, yes, because that's a state secret._ "

Yakov laughed at his own jokes – a hearty, ringing laughter that made her feel as if everything was right with the world. Being with him Lilia almost forgot to be afraid. She laughed alongside him until tears ran down her face. Together they leaned against the railing of the embankment, watching the dark river flowing by. Without ceremony, Yakov had rested his arm around her waist.

Being with him like this was sweet agony. All she wanted was to tumble to the ground in his arms, but it was just as impossible here as it had been in the Alexander Gardens. Her fellow dancers sometimes came back from seeing a man, saying _it was an outrage, he tried to put his hand up my skirt._ Lilia wished that he would. He could try anything he wanted and she wouldn't complain for a instant. Anything. But this, this was unbearable.

"There are five of us in a two-bedroom apartment," she said suddenly, interrupting a joke about Soviet hell that she had heard before. "It's not that I don't..."

"If only we were in Leningrad instead!" replied Yakov. "My roommate is a hockey player. He's always away at matches – either that or out drinking."

Lilia wondered how many girls Yakov had back there, and then concluded that she didn't care, as long as she could have him here. Except, it seemed, she couldn't.

"Or even if I had my car with me," he added. "We could drive out into the countryside, find somewhere..."

 _He has a car,_ thought Lilia, impressed. Still, it would do them no good in Leningrad.

Neither bothered to mention hotels. Putting to one side the fact that Lilia was a Moscow resident, they weren't married: no officious desk clerk looking over their papers would allow them to check into together. Even if Yakov had already had his own hotel room – he was staying with his parents – he would never have been able to sneak her in past the woman on duty in the hallway. Having people think she was easy was one thing, but she drew the line at being mistaken for a whore. 

Yakov leaned over and kissed her. They clung recklessly together for a moment until someone shouted encouragement from a passing car. 

"That didn't help, did it?" asked Yakov, releasing her again.

"No," said Lilia, breathless with need. "It didn't."

In a courtyard in Zamoskvorechye they tried their luck, unable to hold back any longer. Lilia's back pressed against the rough, decaying plaster, Yakov's ardent hands on her thighs, sliding the hem of her dress upwards. He pressed into her so quickly that it would have hurt if she hadn't been so eager. It all happened at once: the sweet, sharp stretch of her inner muscles, Yakov's low grunt of satisfaction, and the sound of a window opening from an apartment above. 

An old woman began to curse them and all their forebears in a cracked and querulous voice.  
Yakov stumbled back, fumbling with his trousers. Lilia steadied herself against the wall with one hand, wiped a strand of hair from her damp forehead. 

They retreated hastily from the courtyard without acknowledging one another – or their lone onlooker. 

Under a streetlight, Yakov's face was shadowed. "I didn't..."

"You did!" replied Lilia, overcome with gusts of hysterical laughter. Her thighs were sticky. 

"How did she even know we were there? She must sit and look out that window all night, just hoping..."

"She was a witch," said Lilia.

There was no harbor for them that night. They wandered the streets of Moscow through the brief hours of summer darkness. All good people were asleep in bed, gathering their strength for the work of the day to come. Apart from the odd drunk stumbling home, or black government Volga speeding past on an unknown errand, it was as if Yakov and Lilia were alone in the city. She had got her wish. 

Sometimes they walked in companionable silence; sometimes they talked idly in low voices of this and that. It was easier this way, to be close by his side in the darkness without having to see his face.

"Sometimes I feel," she found herself saying in the small hours, "that we only learn to be ballet dancers, not to be people."

A moment after she spoke she couldn't remember why she had said it, what could possibly have led to such a confession. Without noticing, she had let down her guard, intoxicated with drowsiness and desire and the lingering taste of Georgian wine on her tongue.

"Are ballet dancers not people too?" asked Yakov.

"It's not encouraged."

Yakov only laughed and put his arm around her waist. "You seem like a person to me."

Their steps blurred together into a dream. The dawn found them in Gorky Park, resting on a bench together. Lilia drowsed against Yakov's shoulder, wrapped in his suit jacket; Yakov, head tipped back, was gently snoring. She watched as tones of grey, and then the first blushes of color, began to seep back into the world. She thought of fairy tales, of an enchantment vanishing at the first light of dawn – _but will I disappear, or will he?_ She would not have been at all surprised to awake only to find herself back in her own bed.

Instead she awoke blinking, still in the park – she hadn't realised that she had fallen back asleep – with the sun already lighting the treetops and a city worker in overalls looking at them both disapprovingly.

"Comrades, you can't sleep here," she said, holding her twig broom as if she were about to sweep them off the bench. "Go back to the railway station."

As if she couldn't imagine any other reason why a well-dressed young couple might find themselves in Gorky Park at quarter past four on a summer morning. Of course they must be waiting for a train. 

For a moment Lilia imagined running away with him, getting a sleeper train to Odessa or Almaty, starting a new life together. But it was impossible. She was meant to be dancing in _Cinderella_ that night.

"All right, we're going," grumbled Yakov, getting to his feet and mustering as much dignity as he could manage in shirtsleeves. Lilia stood too, stretching muscles grown chilly and stiff with the night's dew.

At that hour the only thing open was a workers' canteen near Paveletsky Station. Yakov and Lilia sat together at a tiny formica table, bumping knees, and drank endless cups of tea while all the train drivers and railwaymen made their way in and out. They were both too sleepy to say much of anything. Lilia just sat and smiled at Yakov in between sips from the battered teacup, her self-consciousness almost extinguished by now. 

He was chain smoking rather than eating breakfast. (Lilia glanced down at her own plate, which she had long ago cleaned bare apart from a lingering smear of egg yolk.) His eyes were bleary with forestalled sleep. His hair, rather in need of a trim, overlapped his collar in unruly locks. She loved it. She found herself wishing that she could see him like this every morning.

Finally, another lingering cup of tea later, she spared a reluctant glance for her watch. It was... no, it couldn't be.

"I have morning class at nine," she said quietly.

Yakov seemed startled. "Of course you do," he replied, scowling down at the stylish Ruhla on his wrist as if he disapproved of its timekeeping. "So we'd better go."

Only twelve hours earlier she would have been unsettled by his brusque manner. She would have assumed that he was unhappy with her. Now she knew differently. She thought she did. She got up and followed him towards the door.

On the way they passed a table of old railwaymen in oil-stained jumpsuits, loudly arguing some point of engineering over their cups of tea. They had probably been having the same argument since before the Revolution, thought Lilia. They reminded her of the stagehands at the Bolshoi.

"Then they'll have to restring the whole overhead line and where will you be?" said one man conclusively. Then he half turned in his chair. "Misha, open your eyes! That's... Here in Zamoskvorechye! Well, fuck me."

He got up from the table and clapped a hand on Yakov's shoulder. "Yakov Davidovich, you did us proud in Grenoble! The pride of the Soviet Union! Keep at it – you'll land that triple flip yet. Show the West that we can do anything they do, and do it better."

One of his friends chimed in from a seated position. "And he's not out drinking champagne and eating caviar either. He's with the people at the canteen! Your father works in the Likhachev Plant, doesn't he? My cousin is on the line there."

Yakov said the usual things about being honored to carry the banner of Soviet sport. There were autographs to be signed for the grandchildren. Other people crowded over to see what was going on. The dawn had transformed him back into Yakov Davidovich Feltsman, a slightly disheveled Master of Sport of the USSR. No longer just Lilia's Yasha.

By the time they finally got out the door, the morning sun was high. Lilia was on the verge of being late for her class. Having been spendthrift with the long hours of the night, they were now surprised to find the last seconds running through their hands.

They said goodbye then and there: Yakov kissed her briefly and simply on the lips. 

"I'll write," he said. 

Lilia nodded and then left hurriedly for the Metro before she could do or say something to embarass herself.

***

Lilia sat on the wooden floor of the studio, pointe shoes in hand, frowning at the spots on her heels where the skin had been rubbed raw. Dancing all the hours that God gave you was one thing, but walking halfway across Moscow in patent leather flats was quite another. Well... there was nothing for it but to dance, and to hope that she didn't bleed through the satin of her pointe shoes.

"Well," said Nastya, looking down at her, a lilt of unpleasant amusement in her voice, "what happened to _you_ last night?"

Lilia had had enough. "If you really want to know," she snapped, "Yakov Feltsman took me out to dinner at Aragvi. And then we spent the rest of the night just walking around together."

Nastya just laughed. "If you don't want to tell me what you did last night, then don't."

"Never mind then," said Lilia.

From that moment onwards, she resolved, she would keep her mouth shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aragvi was a real restaurant. If you're interested in reading more about it: [1](https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/1946162/revival-moscow-restaurant-where-kgb-agents-and-soviet-elite) [2](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/kgbs-favorite-restaurant-reopens-moscow-180959732/) [3](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8z7cCwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT104&vq=dining%20out&pg=PT100#v=snippet&q=dining%20out&f=false)


	4. Chapter 4

As he had promised, Yakov started writing to her. The letters were neither long nor eloquent, but they came once a week at least (and sometimes twice), first from his training camp in Ukraine and then from his sport club in Leningrad.

He wrote about his figure skating: lengthy descriptions of his struggles with specific jumps and spins, which she had to look up in a reference book, alongside lengthy descriptions of minor injuries and associated stretching and physiotherapy routines, which she understood without any difficulty. Occasionally he mentioned going out drinking with friends from his sport club, although she suspected that the drinking was far more moderate than he claimed. He went to the cinema to see _Two Comrades Were Serving_ (of course, it starred Vysotsky) and _Zigzag of Success_ (he adored Ryzanov). Once he mentioned a visit to the Leningrad Writers' Club to see a poetry reading by Andrei Voznesensky but said nothing about how he felt about the poetry (it was impressive enough that he had gotten a ticket). She understood that anything too interesting was probably too interesting to be put down on the page. And she hardly expected to hear about his other girl friends, although she was certain that he had them.

Lilia wrote back to him whenever she could find the time, while resting between rehearsals or on a precious day off. She was no natural letter writer. Like him, she fell back on the easy harbor of facts: what she was dancing, what she was rehearsing, what she hoped to dance. Who was dancing the part that she had hoped to dance, and exactly what she thought of their performances. She labored over her sheets of stationery more dutifully than she had ever labored over her assignments at the academy, hoping that some scrap of personality and interest would survive the transition to the flatness of the page.

It was the closing of a letter that was always the most difficult. Yakov seemed unafraid to say what she felt perpetually abashed to admit: _I miss you, Lilechka. It seems so long since I was in Moscow with you. I think about you all the time. I wish I could hold you in my arms and kiss you._

After that, a sentence or two was crossed out. However close she bent over the page, she couldn't decipher any of it. _Your Yasha,_ the letter concluded.

Lilia, who was reading the letter for the third time while stretching backstage before a rehearsal, squirmed in her practice tutu. She could well imagine exactly what he had been thinking because she was thinking the same thing. All of a sudden the fabric of her leotard seemed like a very thin layer separating her from the crotch of the tutu – the company tutu, which some other poor _corps de ballet_ girl would be wearing tomorrow. Well, never mind, a spray of vodka was enough to make most things fresh again.

From the hall came the sound of the orchestra warming up. Lilia folded the letter and tucked it back into its envelope, ready to hide it away in her bag next to her spare pointe shoes. That was the moment when Nastya wandered past and plucked it out of her hand. She looked down at the return address, which was written in Yakov's bold hand.

_Yakov Davidovich Feltsman_  
_Yubileyny Sport Club_  
_18 Dobrolyubova Prospect_  
_Leningrad_

"You devil!" said Nastya. "So _this_ is why you've been writing so many letters. You meant it, didn't you? Yakov _Feltsman_! My God, you work quickly!"

Lilia got to her feet, drew herself up to her full height, and snatched the letter back. "Of course I meant it. I'm not a liar."

 _Not about this anyway,_ she thought to herself. 

She ought to have been angry at Nastya for snooping, for prying into her business. Instead, perversely, she was grateful that her liaison with Yakov (if that was what it was) was about to become public knowledge, even if she never would have announced it herself. Within a few hours probably everyone in the _corps de ballet_ would know – and however silly it might be, she was proud.

"Lil'ka," said Nastya, "you're blushing!"

"No I'm not," said Lilia, blushing.

***

The season at Covent Garden in August was tantalizingly close – and there were rumors of a trip to Munich in the autumn – but when the cast lists were posted on the Bolshoi's notice boards, Lilia's name wasn't anywhere to be found. Masha, the old hand, said "it's only your first year," as if Lilia were once again expecting too much of herself.

Lilia leaned against the wall next to the notice board, exhaustion suddenly claiming her body as if she'd just danced a four-act ballet. As dancers crowded around looking for their own names on the list, she bit her lip and felt her stomach churning with acid.

It wasn't the first time that she had been passed over. Last year, her final year at the Academy, some of her fellow students had travelled to London to perform as 'The Young Stars of the Bolshoi Ballet Academy,' and she hadn't been one of them. She had been one of the best in her year, and she was one of the best dancers in the corps now. Certainly she was far better than Masha. But Masha was a known quantity, Masha was politically reliable, and she, she... she knew exactly why she hadn't been chosen to tour abroad.

 _Not enough,_ she thought frantically. _You should have spoken up more in Komsomol meetings. You should have volunteered to collect donations for the anti-apartheid campaign. You should refine your technique. You should jump higher than anyone in morning class; you shouldn't even compare yourself with the other women, you should always take classes with the men. You should be more flexible, your extension should be higher, never be satisfied with anything less than a 160-degree penché. You should work harder when you understudy Natalia Igorevna, you should go to every rehearsal as if you're on stage with your name on the posters out front. You should be so brilliant that no one can ignore you. You should be better, be better, be better. Why would you ever think that Yasha could actually love you? You're not good enough._

And yet however fervent her self-criticisms, she couldn't distract herself from the terrible truth that remained beneath it all. She wasn't going on tour because her parents had been enemies of the people.

Maybe it was good that she wasn't on the list. Maybe the alternative would be worse: to fill in the travel application, write the autobiography, obtain a 'character' from at least two stars in the firmament of the Bolshoi, chase the endless signatures, go to the interviews with the regional and district party committees in which she would be interrogated about ideology and international politics, which she knew nothing whatsoever about, by people who knew nothing whatsoever about ballet – only then to have to endure the terrified wait to discover whether or not she would receive her passport with the treasured exit visa inside. Only then to have the KGB turn her down.

Masha, maliciously amused, liked to tell stories about dancers who had actually made it to Sheremetovo only to be told at the gate that there was no passport waiting for them there.

"Can you imagine?" she said. "I would _die_."

"So would I," replied Lilia, thinking not of the metaphor but the reality. 

_I would hang myself in the airport toilet,_ she thought emphatically, although she had never before felt the slightest desire to hang herself. She didn't now either, but the idea brought her a perverse comfort: that she wouldn't surrender, that she would show them all. That at least she wouldn't have to walk back out of the airport again with everyone looking at her in pity.

How could anyone go on living after that sort of humiliation? She didn't imagine she could. Even if she somehow endured the moment of utter catastrophe, survived the collapse of all her hopes, the metaphorical death of a travel ban would be real enough. If she couldn't tour, she would have no money, no prestige, no recognition – for how could anyone be truly gifted if they never were invited to tour overseas? She would remain forever a provincial talent. The decision of some bureaucrat she would never meet at the Ministry of Internal Affairs or the KGB could forever seal her fate as an artist. Was it any wonder that she was terrified?

She couldn't share any of these fears with Yakov. Putting them on paper in a letter or voicing them over the phone would have been too dangerous; even if she had seen him face to face, she would never have admitted them. No doubt Yakov Feltsman, the Olympic champion, went abroad whenever he pleased. He competed all over the world. He would never understand. She could never admit to him that her parents had been enemies of the people.

So Lilia was alone with her fear. At the strangest moments – when she turned over in her bed, or lifted a fork to her mouth in the Bolshoi canteen, or paused in the middle of a stretch before a crowded morning class – she would suddenly remember, and begin to feel the panicked thump of her heart. She would think over her situation again and again, her mind running in circles, as if there were some important detail that she had missed, as if she could escape from her captivity of fear if only she were clever enough. As if a dumb, panicked animal could think its way out of a hunter's trap.

It was only when she was dancing that she could forget. It was only when she was dancing that she felt free.

***

One afternoon Lilia went to visit her aunt. Because it was on the way to the apartment, she first went to collect her aunt from the House of Culture where she taught ballet lessons.

Lilia hadn't taken lessons there since she was nine, when she had entered the Moscow State Academy of Choreography. Nonetheless, as soon as she walked through the door, it all came back to her. The faintly warped parquet floors, the poured concrete architecture with its pseudo-marble facings, the wide windows that seemed designed to beckon forwards to socialism, even if the only view they showed was the playground of the tower block next door.

The ballet studio had its familiar smell of rosin and the faint dampness of sweat. Her aunt was teaching a class of thirteen and fourteen year olds just going up on pointe. It was painful. Lilia had never seen so much bad turnout or terrible posture in her life, and not one of the girls was properly over the box of her shoes. Her aunt could criticise and correct all she liked (her aunt could criticise with the best of them), but all the withering expressions in the world couldn't conjure up an ounce of talent – or the body to go along with it. It was such a waste. If it had been up to Lilia, she would have told them all to give up now. They might dream about becoming ballerinas but it was obvious they wouldn't amount to anything much. Maybe someday they would become ballet teachers.

Lilia waited impatiently – resisting the urge to jump in and make some pointed corrections herself – until her aunt clapped her hands and, sighing a little, dismissed the class. "But remember to do your exercises at home!"

Upon being released, all the girls gathered around Lilia.

"Lilia Mikhailovna's here!"

"Hello, Lilia Mikhailovna!"

"Lilia Milkhailovna, can you do a double pirouette?"

"Of course I can," said Lilia.

"Triple pirouette?"

"Yes."

"Four pirouettes?"

"Yes."

"Can you show us now?"

"No," said Lilia.

Her aunt forced her way into the middle of the throng and firmly told the girls that Lilia had more important things to worry about. _Like dancing one of the Two Wilis in Giselle,_ thought Lilia. She hadn't told her aunt the news yet. She didn't manage it on the way home either. While they waited for the bus they talked about the weather (drizzly) and the contents of Lilia's string bag (three cans of artichokes and two pairs of Polish nylons). When the bus came it was too crowded for conversation.

Lilia's aunt lived in a new, modern block, in a two-bedroom apartment which she shared with a teacher of physical education at a local secondary school. When Lilia was a girl they had shared a room in a communal apartment, but a long chain of scheming and carefully orchestrated swaps had found her this rather comfortable place in Ostankinsky. Thankfully Masha taught athletics on Monday afternoons, so they had the apartment to themselves.

It wasn't until they had settled down for tea that Lilia managed to broach the subject of her casting in _Giselle_. Quietly, she was ecstatic. Giselle herself was insipid, but to dance one of the two Wilis – if she could only pull it off – would bring her one step closer to that monumental goal, the Queen of the Wilis herself.

"We're doing _Giselle_ next month," said Lilia, addressing the little _kartoshka_ cake on her plate as if she were passing another commonplace on the weather. "I'm going to be dancing Zulma."

Her aunt made a slightly sour face. "Mmmm, Lilenka, really? I don't know."

"Don't you?" retorted Lilia. "Well, I do. My name was on the list on the notice board. I'm starting rehearsals next week."

She had intended to be so cool and casual about this. She had intended to act as if it were perfectly ordinary news. She was failing already.

"You haven't even been in the _corps de ballet_ for a year, Lilenka. You're not a soloist yet. I've said it before: it's unwise to be in a hurry. There's no point risking injury and making enemies. You have to learn to walk before you can run."

This was one of her aunt's favorite sayings. She seemed to believe that she had been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of ensuring that Lilia didn't think too much of herself. With great satisfaction, over the past few years, Lilia had made this increasingly difficult for her. And yet she still tried – and it still drove Lilia crazy.

"Tell Yuri Nikolayevich! Why would they have given me the part if they didn't think I could dance it?"

"There are a lot of reasons why they cast one person and not another."

There was a condescending tone in her voice, as if Lilia were a little girl crying about not being chosen for a plum part in the school's annual recital. And yet at the same time her tone managed to intimate that there was some ulterior, grown-up reason for Lilia's casting, some reason that ought to be known to Lilia herself.

"I know that, Aunt Raisa! I know! I dance for the _Bolshoi Ballet_!"

"You're still a girl. Don't think you know everything. It's dangerous."

What was she meant to say to that? What on earth could she say? Because she couldn't scream, Lilia bit her lip and sipped her tea. The man next door was swearing at his wife, as he always did. There were shouts from children playing outside. Only Lilia was silent.

 _It's dangerous._ Her aunt's words echoed in her mind. Maybe Lilia didn't fear being cast in _Giselle_ but there were things she did fear. Other things. Things she couldn't admit to anyone but her aunt. She swallowed, her mouth dry despite the tea.

"I might go on tour next summer," she said finally. After a few beats of her heart, she added, "if they decide to give me permission to travel abroad."

Her aunt made a sudden, convulsive movement. "Are you done with your tea? Let's take these..."

She snatched up the cups and the teapot, although it was still half full with hot, fresh tea, and took them quickly into the little kitchen. Lilia followed. Her aunt had turned the faucets in the sink on full, both hot and cold. The teapot and cups sat on the counter next to it, forgotten.

"If they do," said her aunt, "they do. And if they don't..."

She shrugged, then folded her arms and looked at Lilia. It was clear that she wanted nothing less than to talk to her niece about this, but knew that it was impossible to avoid. Lilia felt much the same way.

"I can't help thinking about it," confessed Lilia in low tones. "That they won't give me the exit visa because, because..."

Even now she didn't know why her parents had been arrested. Once, a few years ago, she had worked up the courage to ask her aunt the reason, only to be rebuffed. _I have no idea,_ she had been told. _And you should be glad that you don't either. The less you know, the easier it is to live._

"Who knows how they decide these things," said her aunt. She opened the faucet a little more, as if the water could be pouring any faster into the drain. "I did the best I could for you. They accepted you into the Bolshoi, didn't they?"

"But you know, if they look, really look... it's not going to fool them. If you want to travel overseas, they look closer. Lots of people's applications get rejected; everyone is always talking about it." 

Lilia shivered a little, even though she was alone with her aunt in the warm apartment.

"Then you won't be the only one. If you can't tour, it won't kill you."

"But I have to!" said Lilia, forgetting to keep her voice low. Her aunt raised her eyebrows.

"I have to tour," Lilia repeated, much more quietly. "I wondered whether I ought to tell the truth when they ask me to write my biography for the exit visa. If they know already, maybe it's better to admit it. Maybe it's better not to lie to them."

Her aunt looked at her as if she were even less intelligent than she had previously believed.

"Lilenka, you should keep your mouth shut."

"But..."

"How do they know that you know what happened to your parents? You were a tiny girl. It's better to be ignorant than to be honest. Keep your mouth shut. There's no reason to mention it to anyone."

An imp of perversity sprung into Lilia. 

"But what if I get married someday?" she said, and then wished she hadn't, because the suggestion was too close to the bone. She hadn't told her aunt anything about Yakov – nor did she intend to, because there was nothing suitable for her aunt to hear. But now she was committed. 

"What about then?" she demanded. "What am I meant to tell my husband?"

"Nothing at all," said her aunt tartly, her lips narrowing in disapproval, as if she had already judged Lilia's future husband and found him – or, more likely, her – wanting. "Why would you burden a man with that? What good would it do either of you?"

Lilia nodded slowly, a chill hopelessness descending over her. It was the obvious answer, the only answer. So why did it feel as if lead was settling into her bones? She leaned against the countertop, feeling the edge of it cutting into her hipbone.

"You shouldn't even be thinking about these things," said her aunt. 

"Because I don't have a boyfriend?"

"Because a strong person forgets the past. A strong person can be reborn as many times as necessary."

Lilia wrote to Yakov afterwards: _I went to my mother's for tea on Sunday. We talked about ballet, of course. She's a ballet teacher. We never talk about anything else._


	5. Chapter 5

Lilia sat and shivered in the stands of the Sports Palace of the Central Lenin Stadium. The men's free skate at the Prize of Moscow News was about to get underway and her nerves were pulled as tight as a violin string.

Eight months after she had first met him at that reception at Pashkov House, she was finally about to see Yakov skate. He'd sent her a ticket and she was sitting in the VIP section next to Party officials and the honored sportsmen and sportswomen of the past. She would be seeing him after the competition. She ought to have been happy. Instead her stomach was tied in knots.

It should have been just like going to a performance at the Bolshoi, but it was completely different. At the Bolshoi she would have been comfortably surrounded by the gilt and plush of the theater, listening to the orchestra playing the overture, waiting for the heavy curtain to open. But the Sports Palace was cold and drafty, pitilessly lit by fluorescent lights hanging from the overhead girders, with tinny pre-recorded music echoing off the concrete and the ice. And the athletes were warming up not in the wings, but under the full gaze of the audience.

Yakov was nervous. Even from the last row of the stadium, even if she hadn't known him, she would have been able to read the tension in his shoulders, the stiffness in his back. He was injured, she knew. Just a strain, he had said in his letters, but it was enough to be obvious to anyone who had eyes to see. If for some reason she had missed all of this, she would have known when she saw him fall on his first jump – and narrowly avoid falling on his second.

No artistic director would have considered putting a dancer on stage who wasn't able to perform a jump flawlessly in rehearsal. Ballet was about creating the illusion of effortless beauty, not about defeating the competition – however much Lilia might have felt otherwise when she observed the performance of her fellow dancers in morning class and plotted her own rise to glory. 

Seeing Yakov warming up brought the difference home to her: like all his fellow figure skaters, he willingly risked failure and humiliation at every competition, performing at the ragged edge of his skill and gambling that luck might carry him to victory.

It was excruciating. Lilia had never cared a tenth as much about anyone else's performance, not even if it was her own partner. She might be angry with a partner if he failed to measure up, but she would never fear for him on stage. She feared for Yakov. One by one she watched the other competitors skate their programs, her hands clenched, nails digging painfully into her palms.

When Yakov finally took to the ice, she had to sit on her hands to keep from wringing them. His performance was perhaps not as bad as his warm-up had been, but that was not saying much. He only fell once. It felt as if he held himself together through sheer force of will, an innate stubbornness and power that carried him through even when by rights he ought to have fallen apart. But he was so stiff, so painfully, painfully stiff.

Lilia almost forgot to applaud at the end. She was stiff too. Her own muscles ached with accumulated tension, so intensely had she been willing him onwards. She had come to the Sports Palace hoping to be swept away with hero worship and admiration. Instead she had seen that her hero was painfully mortal. She didn't want to love a man who had such feet of clay – and yet she did. She did. 

_Oh, God help me, I love him. I love him. What am I meant to do now?_

The realisation hit her with concussive force, as if she were the one whose body had been dashed against the ice. Abashed, she looked around at her neighbors in the stands, as if they could somehow sense what she was thinking, but no one seemed to notice. They were all gathering their bags and coats, getting ready to go.

There was no need to wait for the medal ceremony. Yakov had come in fifth. Some minor functionary came to collect Lilia from her seat and show her to the dressing room. She didn't need to put on her coat, because she had never taken it off. She picked up the bouquet she had brought, already wilting in the cold, and followed the man down into the bowels of the Sports Palace.

***

It seemed that they didn't even have proper dressing rooms in figure skating. Yakov was leaning against a cinderblock wall outside the men's locker room, the shirt of his costume half unbuttoned, smoking a cigarette. Next to him stood a bald man in a suit with a long, pale, narrow face. She might have assumed that he was an official from the KGB, had she not seen him on television at other competitions – in fact he was Yakov's coach. Perhaps this should also have been obvious by the way he was telling him off.

"Hello Yasha," said Lilia cautiously as she approached.

"Hello Lilia," he replied.

He barely met her eyes. In his letters he'd begun to call her _Lilechka_ but there was obviously going to be none of that today. He took a deep drag on his cigarette.

"This is my coach, Oleg Petrovich," he added. "Oleg Petrovich, this is Lilia."

It was as if he expected his coach to have heard of her, which was ridiculous. There was no reason he would have.

Oleg Petrovich looked her up and down. "Mm," he said disapprovingly, but seemed to have no further comment.

"These are for you," said Lilia, thrusting the big bouquet at Yakov. 

Now that she was here, the roses seemed faintly ridiculous, although she'd had great trouble finding a nice bouquet in the middle of December. She hadn't imagined that there would be no sign of a vase. 

Yakov tucked the bouquet under one arm. "Thank you."

Lilia cast about for something – anything to say – to him about the competition.

"Your knee was hurting you," she said finally. She couldn't bring herself to add a questioning tone to her voice because she knew that it was true.

"It was," acknowledged Yakov gloomily.

"Sloppy technique," said Oleg Petrovich with the tone of someone who had said the same thing many times before. "You'll need to work twice as hard now if you want to be selected for the European Championships."

"I know," said Yakov.

"And avoid all distraction. _All_ distraction, do you hear me?"

"I know, Oleg Petrovich."

He still wasn't looking at her. Lilia felt half despairing. Sending letters was one thing but the reality was nothing like the months of longing. An awkward half stranger stood in front of her and the worst of it was that even while sulking he was still devastatingly handsome. Sweat was still beaded on his deep forehead and his upper lip, where dark stubble had begun to show even halfway through the afternoon. Sweat was still beaded on his chest, where his half-open shirt framed a few stray curls of chest hair. Lower down, his tightly-fitting trousers... no, she definitely shouldn't be looking any lower down.

Oh, this was unbearable. What else was she meant to talk about, the weather? No doubt he had hoped – once upon a time, before all his hopes had fallen to dust – that she would see his performance and come to meet him afterwards exclaiming over its glamour and athletic brilliance. Failing that, he surely would want a woman to gently console him, to stroke his ego, to say that it would be better next time, to say that his artistry shone through despite the ragged jumping passes. She couldn't do that. She knew how bad it had been, and he would know that she knew. What was the point of lying to him? If the situation had been reversed, she would have been insulted if he had lied to her.

 _So that's that,_ she thought. _A man's pride._

His coach obviously didn't want her there. She wasn't certain that he really wanted her there. And she was beginning to feel that she had better places to be herself.

"Well," she said finally, "thank you very much for the ticket. I was glad to have the chance to see you skate."

"If you'd said you enjoyed seeing Sergei Chetverukhin skate," grumbled Yakov, "I might have believed you."

"I know what I enjoyed!" said Lilia, though in fact she hadn't enjoyed a minute of it. 

"I wouldn't..."

"I have to go," interrupted Lilia. "I have to perform tonight. But if you... if you ever want a ticket to the Bolshoi, you can call me. Goodbye, Yasha."

She turned on the ball of her foot so sharply that she might have been about to launch into a pirouette. She walked away from him like she would be turned to a pillar of salt if she looked behind her.

***

By the time she got back to her apartment, her head was pounding. She was still shivering with suppressed tension and the chill of the rink. She drank cup after cup of tea, hoping to drive away the headache, hoping to drive away the chill. It didn't do much good. She wished that Yakov had come to see her dance instead. She wouldn't have fallen.

When the phone rang, she got to it before any of her housemates.

"Lilechka," said a familiar voice, an undertone, as if he too were standing in a hallway somewhere, "it's me. Yasha."

She knew that without being told, of course, she knew. Her breath caught just hearing his voice. At the same time she felt a flare of spiteful anger. She wanted to say something to hurt him.

"You want a ticket already?"

He ignored this, as it deserved. "Today was – it all went wrong. I blame Oleg Petrovich for everything."

"Because of your training...?"

"Because he doesn't believe in girlfriends. So I couldn't really talk. I couldn't have talked even if I... well, anyway. What's done is done. Come to lunch with me tomorrow."

"All right," said Lilia, taken aback. _Am I his girlfriend? Does he really think that?_

There was something of the force of nature in him. It was impossible to say no, not that she really wanted to. "Where? Should we meet on the Bolshoi steps, like before?"

"No. Come to my parents' place in Danilovsky. You're invited – it won't be Oleg Petrovich all over again. They love having people over. After lunch, we can go skating in Gorky Park."

"I..."

 _I don't know anything about families,_ she wanted to say. _You don't want to introduce me to your parents. They'll hate me. I know they will. It would be easier if you asked me to compete at the Prize of Moscow News._

"Please," said Yakov.

"When?" breathed Lilia, her voice no more than a whisper.

"Noon? Or one? Whenever you want, really..."

Thus, so easily, all her resolve was undone.

***

The Feltsmans' apartment block in Danilovsky was almost identical to her aunt's in Ostankinsky, although it was halfway across the city. Lilia made her way up the steps to the third floor with strangely lagging feet, gazing at the plant sitting in a big pot on the deep stairway windowsill. A few leaves were yellowing, curling gently at the corners as if it were pining for a tropical homeland it had never seen.

From inside the apartment came the sound of voices and laughter. After Lilia knocked, the door opened almost instantly. It was Yakov, in his stocking feet, wearing a striped navy jumper and what looked like Western jeans.

"You came," he said, stepping out into the hallway and leaving the door open behind him. 

"Don't be silly." 

He took her into her arms and kissed her. "That was for yesterday... and this one is for today."

He kissed her again, more deeply. In response Lilia could muster only a small, incoherent noise of desire. She rested her hands against his broad chest, then slid them around to splay across his shoulder blades. The heavy wool of his jumper prickled against her palms. He kissed her for a third time.

"Is that for tomorrow?" ventured Lilia, though she knew that he would be leaving for Leningrad tomorrow.

Yakov laughed. "That's because I'm greedy."

"Me too," said Lilia, and kissed him once more for good measure.

She could have stood forever with him on that nondescript landing, its tiles gritty with sand and melting slush, their only audience the potted plant and a marmalade cat that had begun twining around their ankles. She slid her hands downwards, tucked them into the pockets of his jeans (definitely Western, you could tell from the feel of the denim) and readied herself for yet another kiss.

A woman's voice came from the apartment. "Come in, come in! Yasha, don't let all the warm air out! Or the cat in!"

Lilia and Yakov disentangled themselves from one another and she followed him inside. While Lilia took off her shoes in the doorway, Yakov made a face and stripped off his newly damp socks. There was a brace on his ankle; bunions on both feet were darkened with bruises. It was all very familiar to Lilia.

A woman hovered in the doorway of the hall. "Yashenka, she doesn't want to see your bare feet."

Lilia smiled tentatively at Yakov's mother – for she could be no one else.

In the little kitchen Lilia was immediately swept away with overlapping conversation: Yakov's parents; his older brother Mikhail and sister-in-law Rosa; a niece and a nephew underfoot and a baby at Rosa's breast; an elderly woman and her mousy daughter, whom Lilia at first assumed were relations and only later discovered were neighbors who happened to have an enthusiasm for ballet. There was no awkwardness because there was no room for it. There was tea from the samovar and Yakov's mother was busy over the gas stove. Lilia and Yakov barely fit through the door: Yakov leaned against the frame and tucked her under his arm. Nothing could have been more different from the quiet of her aunt's apartment, where the ticking of the clock measured out disapproving silences.

"You got away from the Bolshoi?" asked Yakov's mother. "They let you come out?"

"I went to class and had a rehearsal this morning," said Lilia, who had run out of the studio as quickly as she could and still had been nearly twenty minutes late.

"She's a Stakhanovite," said Yakov to his father, who made a noise of measured approval. "All ballet dancers are. Morning class from nine and she dances all day until... what time did your performance finish last night?"

"Eleven," said Lilia.

"A woman works from morning till night, whatever it is she does," declared Yakov's mother.

"Isn't it true?" said Rosa.

"She's a doctor," said Yakov confidentially into Lilia's ear.

"And what are you dancing now?" asked the elderly woman.

" _Swan Lake_ ," said Lilia, whose head was already beginning to spin with all this overlapping conversation. "And _The Nutcracker_ and _The Little Humpbacked Horse_ in rehearsal."

"Which part?" followed the woman's daughter.

"I'm in the _corps_ in _Swan Lake_ and _The Little Humpbacked Horse_. But I'm dancing the Arabian Dance in _The Nutcracker_."

An exclamation of delight came from both mother and daughter. Lilia couldn't help but smile to herself. She liked to imagine a government official taking his family to the ballet for the New Year, getting so hot under the collar that he would be tempted to put his hands over his little son's eyes. No one would forget her after this.

"Our bronze medallist tells us that he works from morning till night," said Yakov's mother, stirring a pot of soup. "At training camp all summer, not a moment to visit his parents. Lilia, do you really think that..."

"Mama, you _know_ I can't..."

"And I'm a gymnast!" exclaimed the little boy.

There was hardly a moment to worry about saying the wrong thing, because there was hardly a moment to say anything at all before the conversation flowed in three different directions. Lilia was content to stand comfortable and warm, leaning against Yakov's side, his arm around her shoulders. None of the people packed into the little kitchen seemed to find it at all strange that she was there. If she had brought Yakov to her aunt, an idea that she had never contemplated for a moment, it would have sparked a quiet interrogation worthy of the Lubyanka. Here the life of the kitchen flowed on around her, for all the world as if she were a natural part of it. _That's because he brings girls home all the time,_ Lilia told herself, but she was not entirely convinced. The thought unsettled her, strange bursts of happiness bubbling up within and catching her off-guard.

"Are you all right?" mumured Yakov confidentially. "They're always like this."

"Of course," said Lilia in reply, and was surprised to find that it was true.

Thankfully, once they sat down to dinner, the flood of conversation slackened to a trickle. It was impossible to talk much while coming to grips with the mountains of food that Yakov's mother had somehow conjured from the tiny kitchen. Herring under a fur coat, marinated mushrooms, chicken soup, kugel, golubtsy... even seven adults, awkwardly crowded around the square kitchen table (Lilia had been granted a side to herself) found it difficult to come to grips with such bounty. She accepted seconds and then, to the great disappointment of Yakov's mother, her appetite finally failed her.

It was Yakov who, with a mighty sigh, pushed back first from the table.

"We'd better go," he said, "The sun won't wait. I promised Lilia I'd take her to Gorky Park."

There were exclamations of protest and embraces all around and Yakov's mother attempting to press upon her a generous portion of the remaining kugel. Lilia shook her head firmly.

"Well, then you'll have to come back soon," said Yakov's mother, as if bargaining were somehow necessary.

Lilia wasn't certain whether or not she had agreed. Yakov swept her out of the apartment amidst a whirlwind of goodbyes and nearly-forgotten mittens.

"My parents loved you," he said over his shoulder, going down the stairs two at a time.

"But I didn't say anything!" protested Lilia, running after him. "How could they know? How do _you_ know?"

"I know!" was all Yakov said in reply.

***

By the time they arrived at Gorky Park, the sun was already lowering from its noontime height, but it was a clear day – with the sunshine in your face, it felt far warmer than -2C – and the park was bursting at the seams. Cross-country skiiing trails, snowshoe trails, skating trails, hockey rinks, figure skating rink, children's rink... all of them were thronged with earnest believers in the power of physical culture, fresh air and healthy exertion.

While Yakov sat down on a wooden bench and swiftly laced up his skates, Lilia lingered by the side of the figure skating rink. 

"I haven't been skating since I was little," she said, watching a girl trip on her own toe picks and go sprawling across the ice.

She had been so surprised to be invited to dinner with his family that she had taken no real notice of his plans for the rest of the day. Probably she would have said yes if he had invited her to go skydiving. In fact she hadn't been skating since she had started at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, because they never would have allowed a student to do anything so foolish.

And now Lilia couldn't help thinking of the danger. An ankle sprain, a tear to a ligament: these would be so easy in the punishing cold. What would her aunt say if she knew the risk she about to take? What would Yuri Nikolayevich say if she had to go to him tomorrow morning and admit that she wasn't able to dance because she had gone figure skating in Gorky Park? 

Perhaps most importantly, what would Yakov think if she turned out to be completely terrible on the ice?

"You'll pick it up," he said cheerfully. "You have strong ankles, you have perfect balance..."

He set his skate bag aside, pulled out the second pair of skates, and patted the bench next to him. "Here you are. I'll just go and get warmed up while you're putting those on."

Lilia got one foot halfway out of her boot before she got distracted watching Yakov warm up. 

Performing a competitive programme alongside other elite skaters yesterday, he had appeared no better than mediocre. Here... it wasn't as if there was any lack of good skaters in Gorky Park. Even so, only a few strokes on the ice was enough to show that he was in a different league from any of them. Just doing back crossovers around the rink, his casual assurance and his speed across the ice stood out like a beacon. Then he wound up for a jump, and it was just a single, but he landed it with a disdainful ease that left Lilia breathing through parted lips. Little clouds of her own frosty breath rose up around her. He hadn't even taken off his _ushanka_. Then he went into a spin and when he came out of it – holding his _ushanka_ on with one hand – he glanced in her direction.

Oh, she couldn't. She just couldn't. She started struggling with the skates, feeling that they had wronged her in some way. They were hard as rocks, the leather unbending, as if the cold had soaked into them already. She fought the urge to beat the toe boxes against the bench to soften them a little.

Yakov appeared by her side, only slightly winded by his exercise, to help her lace them up. He performed this task quickly and skillfully.

"They're stiffer than you need," he observed, "but they're all I could get hold of."

Lilia laughed, gingerly testing the strength of her feet inside the unyielding boots. "It's like wearing a cast! I can't point my toes at all!"

"You don't need to," said Yakov, offering her his hand.

After her first halting steps onto the ice – that stumble had been surprise at the unfamiliar surface, nothing more – she found her balance. He was warm, and steady, and close, but she didn't need to lean on him for support. It was entirely unnnecessary.

When Yakov resolved her dilemma by taking his arm away, Lilia felt a pang of regret. Why was she always cursed to get what she wished for? He made a neat little turn and began to skate backwards in front of her, studying her progress with a half smile. Lilia sketched a little gesture with her arms, essayed a small arabesque, then a deeper one. Although the ice was bumpy, and the blade of a figure skate much narrower than the toe of a pointe shoe, her ankle strength didn't fail her.

A real smile spread across Yakov's face. "Perfect. 6.0."

So they wound their way through field and glade, around Gorky Park, as the lowering sun began to spill a deeper gold across the snow and the cold began to nip at Lilia's cheeks. Children were laughing. Faster skaters dodged around them, their edges biting into the ice. And the chase began: slowly and effortlessly, Yakov began to increase his speed, still skating backwards, glancing over his shoulder every now and then, until she had to drive hard just to keep up.

"It's unfair," exclaimed Lilia finally. Her lungs were burning with effort, but her soul burned even more with the pique of finding him perpetually out of reach. "I didn't come here just to chase after you."

"Oh?" He broke off into a sequence of little figures, changing direction with seemingly casual twists of the ankle. "Why did you come, then?"

She couldn't answer that. Thankfully she was rescued by one of the park supervisors, who started delivering a scolding to Yakov: "Comrade, it isn't allowed! Skating must be in one direction only. There's a rink for practicing figures!"

Yakov silently doffed his hat in apology.

"That's what you get for showing off," said Lilia with satisfaction.

Yakov doffed his cap to her as well.

***

That afternoon they skated and skated, crisscrossing Gorky Park until they finally began to tire – Yakov no less than Lilia. He was a figure-skater, after all, accustomed to measuring his efforts to a four-minute programme rather than a four-act ballet. So Lilia told herself, although she also suspected that he was exaggerating his fatigue in order to save her pride.

It didn't matter. They joined the crowds of people standing in line for a hot chocolate. Then, on foot, they began to wander the lesser-traveled paths of the park, overhung by the bare boughs of trees. In the distance there were still shouts of delight from the ferris wheel and the sledding hill, but the sun had subsided into a bank of clouds, staining them all hot pink and gold, and the shadows had stretched out to cover the park. People had begun to go home to dinner and the ice hockey match on television.

Yakov and Lilia found themselves finally alone in a glade of trees. A few snow flurries were falling. He clasped her mittened hands in his. They were both wearing so many layers that she felt nothing from his embrace other than the pressure of his heavy down coat against her own. Despite herself, Lilia had begun to shiver and, for all that she desired him, under the circumstances she couldn't imagine removing a single item of clothing. Maybe not ever.

He kissed her. His lips were shockingly warm. 

"Do you have any idea how much I've missed you, Lilechka? Six months apart. It's unbearable."

He was so much more courageous than her: full of passion, not afraid to love. She could warm herself from his feelings, like warming herself at a fire.

"Yes," said Lilia, hoping that this covered everything she meant to express. "Yes."

"My coach has no idea what love is," he continued. "He's too old. He forgot about all that years ago."

"It's the same at the Bolshoi. But what can we do about it?"

He sighed heavily, clouds of his warm breath rising up around them. They stood together under the bare trees watching the blaze of the sunset dimming slowly into grey. A little burst of ice pellets blew in with a gust of wind, stinging against her face. Lilia laughed at the miniature violence of the storm; Yakov moved to shield her with his body. The tempest slackened.

Yakov loudly cleared his throat. _Maybe he's getting a little bit of a cold,_ thought Lilia, and hoped that she wouldn't catch it. Maybe she shouldn't let him kiss her again. Not that she would be able to resist if he tried.

He took her hand in his, then let it drop again.

"So, Lilechka," he said awkwardly, "I don't know how a man is meant to say this. I've never done it before. Obviously. But, well... there is something we can do about it. Would you marry me?"

Lilia's mouth fell open. She was left almost speechless. Perhaps it would have been better if she had been speechless.

"You're crazy," she said.

But Yakov was undissuaded. "I know we haven't spent that much time together, but why should we wait for the sake of waiting? I could give you all the reasons..."

There was no need; she knew the reasons. They understood one another: both athletes and artists, each in their own way. Both Jews. It was time for her to start thinking about marrying; past time for him. They would probably be given their own apartment: they would be able to spend time together by rights, whenever they had time to spend, no more grasping at scraps. Marrying a sporting hero of the Soviet Union could do no harm whatsoever to the public image of an aspiring ballerina; marrying her might even help to raise _his_ profile, soon enough. Together they would be known; they might have some little influence. They were obviously sexually compatible. She couldn't imagine wanting anyone more than she wanted him. And oh, she loved him, she loved him.

Yet how she wished that he hadn't spoiled the end of their beautiful afternoon together by asking her a question that she couldn't answer.

Yakov shrugged. "But there's no point," he went on, "because really there's only one reason. Because I've fallen in love with you."

A moment of giddiness. Standing in front of him, in his heavy winter parka and scarf and _ushanka_ , she felt his gravitational pull. He could have been the moon and she the cosmonaut drawn into his orbit. It was all she could do to stop herself from falling into his arms.

And yet no Soviet cosmonaut had ever orbited the moon; the Americans had gotten there first. 

Even in that moment she could still feel the secret fear eating away within her. She could never escape it, not even on a December afternoon in Gorky Park. She knew what she had to do. She gathered herself, steeled herself for the pain, like preparing to land on an injured ankle that she knew might buckle beneath her. Better to get it over with quickly.

"No," she said. "No, I couldn't. We wouldn't be happy together."

"Oh," said Yakov stiffly. "Thank you for being honest with me."

He paused, swallowed carefully. Swallowed again. The wind was sculpting the powdery snow into curves and arcs, laying bare the layer of ice underneath.

"I do think," he added, "that I would have been very happy with you. And I know I would have done my best to make you happy."

Back in November she had seen a man tear a ligament onstage in the middle of dancing _Sleeping Beauty_. She had watched him gather every fiber of strength and resolve, not in order to keep dancing, but only to limp offstage without disgracing himself by collapsing or crying out in pain. That was the expression she saw on Yakov's face. 

And she was a coward. She had always intended to shield him from the truth. Driven by a sudden impulse, she did exactly the opposite.

"My parents were – my parents were enemies of the people," she said all in a rush. "They were sent to the camps. My father died; my mother never came back."

He stared at her baffled, uncomprehending. Yakov might have been a Jew but his parents were good proletarians, honest factory workers, faithful party members. Yakov was a Master of Sport of the Soviet Union. No doubt he could hardly imagine what it really meant.

"Your mother..." he began, questioning.

"My mother is my aunt. My real mother never came back from Kolyma. When they released her, she stayed in Magadan."

When Lilia was thirteen her aunt had taken her to visit her mother, five days on the trans-Siberian railway. It had been her holiday from the academy but she had insisted on practicing every morning, faithfully doing her pliés and relevés in the narrow corridor outside their compartment with people squeezing past and the train rattling onwards. 

They never should have gone. Her mother, living in a cramped, dank basement apartment in Magadan, had been a broken woman. Lilia had been half afraid of her; she could have been Baba Yaga out of a fairy tale. She had been unable to connect the old, haggard, wary woman standing in front of her with the mama of little Lilia Mikhailovna from Yekaterinburg. More than that: she had been unable to connect herself with that little girl whose mama had been taken away. It was as if in the course of a decade they had become two completely different people. 

Lilia had danced for her mother, because they could barely speak to one another.

 _You know how she survived,_ said her aunt to her in an undertone, one night on the long journey back to Moscow. _She slept with the director of the camp. That's why she wouldn't come home. So let it be a lesson._

Lilia wondered now whether the lesson was not actually the opposite of what her aunt had believed.

"But is that, is that why you won't...?" asked Yakov haltingly, strangely hesitant. "Why you said no?"

It brought Lilia out of her reverie. "Yes!" she said, feeling that this ought to have been obvious. "I've lied on all my biographies. I lied to you. No one knows. I'll have to go on lying for the rest of my life."

"But what does it matter?"

"What does it _matter_?" she cried. "What do you think they would do to me if they found out that I lied to cover up my spoiled biography? And to _you_?"

Almost every night she woke with her stomach gripped with the terror that one day everything would come crashing down around her. The higher she rose, the more recognition she won, the more she had to lose. She couldn't possibly inflict that on Yakov. He was an innocent. If she hadn't known this already, it would have been obvious from what he said next.

"It was years ago. No one cares any more. Since Khrushchev..."

"Do you see Khrushchev anywhere around now? They never forget! They'll look into their files one day, the men in the Lubyanka, the men who eat dinner at Aragvi, and they'll notice, they'll see... They never forget. Never! You should find someone who won't drag you down. You deserve someone as good as you are. You deserve a wife fit for a Soviet hero."

"You can't be that modest!" he exclaimed. "I've seen you dance, before I even knew who you were. In five years – three years! – you'll be... well, I want to see it. Don't talk to me about Soviet heroes."

She stared at him. She couldn't think.

"Lilechka," he said, "I love you. I told you I loved you. I haven't stopped loving you. This doesn't change anything. I want to marry you."

She was a coward. She ought to have lied to him now, when it really mattered – insisted that she didn't love him, that she didn't want to marry him. She ought to have thrown herself away, sacrificed herself, forgotten entirely about being his Lilechka, the silly romantic girl who had gone on ice skates because of her foolish love for him. A strong person would have forgotten him; a strong person would have said no.

Instead she started weeping. "Yasha, Yasha, don't say that. Please don't."

"Shh," he said, putting his arms around her. "It will be all right. You'll see."

"You're a fool," she said, her tears hot against his strong shoulder. "You don't understand anything at all."

"I know what matters," he said. "Lilechka, do you _want_ to marry me?"

Torturers could not have done worse. No interrogation in the basements of the Lubyanka would have made the slightest impact on her. Thumbscrews could not have drawn it out of her – but Yakov did.

"Yes," she admitted.

"Then we'll get married," said Yakov. "As soon as we can."

***

In later years, when she had almost everything that she could have wished as a girl of nineteen, many journalists and historians and biographers had asked her to recount the story of how she had married Yakov Feltsman.

She didn't consciously lie to them: she herself had almost entirely forgotten that she had cried that afternoon in Gorky Park. And if she did remember, the tears transfigured themselves with the passage of time into tears of joy.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got so long that I've split it into two. So there are now eight chapters, and chapter seven should be up shortly.

The next time she saw Yakov, it was their wedding day. 

They had snatched the only date that presented itself out of his training schedule, just after the European Championships, two months before the World Championships. They had received special dispensation to waive the usual three-month wait for a marriage license. Perhaps they could have waited for spring, for the end of his competition season – only at the time it had felt as if they couldn't.

A couple of weeks earlier, Lilia had finally been given her promotion to soloist; she couldn't help wondering whether it had actually been a coincidence. Certainly it had done no harm in the headlines: _Yakov Feltsman, bronze medallist in figure skating at the Olympic Games in Grenoble, is to marry Lilia Baranovskaya, soloist of the Bolshoi Theatre._

Blinking at the words in the newspaper that morning over a cup of tea while her aunt fussed around her, she felt as if they were describing two different people entirely.

***

It was a grey and lowering afternoon when the car pulled up at Wedding Palace #1 in the north of Moscow. The clouds were wearily shaking out a few thin flakes, and the dirty snowbanks stood forbiddingly high, contrasting with the vivid teal of the facade. Lilia could barely get the car door open; she clambered out of the car shivering in the gusty wind, holding the hem of her dress to avoid sweeping up the salt and grit that pockmarked the snow and asking herself who in their right mind would choose to get married in late January.

Inside the heavy door, in the little entryway, Lilia's aunt stopped for a moment to get her breath from the wind; Lilia bent to pull on her heels, which she had carried in her hand.

"Lilenka," said her aunt, "you know that this is very serious."

Lilia blinked, for a moment wondering why her aunt suddenly didn't trust her to pull on a pair of shoes.

"When you're an old woman," her aunt continued, her voice lowered, "you'll look back on this as the day that made you happy in life – or otherwise. So you should be certain that you're getting married for the right reasons."

Lilia laughed incredulously and shook her head. What sort of silly little girl did her aunt think she was, that she would marry a man just because she wanted to sleep with him? Maybe that was what they had done back in the _shtetl_ , but she was a modern woman, a Soviet citizen! This was Moscow – this was 1969!

"Aunt Raisa, I'm marrying him!" she said, fighting the urge to make a dramatic gesture with her snow boots in her hand. "There's nothing else to say about it."

Of course having Yakov as her husband would certainly make it more _convenient_ to sleep with him, but this was merely a consideration, not the reason itself. She had accepted his proposal because... because it would have broken her heart to say no.

It was true that she could hardly envision her future married life; it was true, in fact, that she was almost afraid to try. It was true that the last month had seemed as improbable as a dream, but then her whole life had been no different. What had she known, really known, about the life of a ballet dancer when she had entered the Bolshoi Ballet Academy at ten years old? You couldn't know the future. Her mother certainly hadn't known the future. All you could do was leap – and hope that you flew rather than falling on your face.

If she had wanted to argue, Lilia could have pointed out that half the _corps de ballet_ was already divorced, mostly from one another. At least she wasn't marrying another dancer – heaven preserve her from that! Yakov knew enough about ballet to understand, and yet not enough that he could tell her what to do. It was perfect; he was perfect. Not that she would ever say this to her aunt, because she could hardly admit – even to Yakov himself – how much she loved him.

"You're a stubborn devil," said her aunt, shaking her head. 

She shoved open the tall, heavy inner door. Other people were coming up the steps; they had to move on. Lilia was forced, humiliatingly, to follow her aunt in order to continue being insulted. There wasn't much more room inside, where a previous wedding party was lingering. An old woman was weeping into an already much-used handkerchief; two men stood with their arms around each others' shoulders, already slightly the worse for wear with vodka; a woman was upbraiding a small child, shaking him a little by the arm to get his attention.

Meanwhile Lilia was getting much the same treatment from her aunt.

"Getting married is a serious business," she continued, not willing to leave it alone. "Whether or not you listen when I say it, you can't go on behaving as if you're the center of the universe. Your husband and your family will have to come first."

"Oh," retorted Lilia, "is that why you never got married?" 

And if her aunt said anything else to her, she didn't hear it.

***

Simply finding herself in the same room as Yakov again would have been thrilling enough for Lilia. To actually be marrying him was beyond belief.

Standing in the foyer of the Wedding Palace waiting for Yakov to arrive, she felt a numb, unfocused anticipation, a tingling in her lips and fingertips far distant from her heart. Who stood in the wings before Act II of _Swan Lake_ actually thinking that they were about to be transformed into a swan? Well, it didn't matter whether she believed it or not, because she knew her role: the beautiful young bride, the focus of admiration and envy, walking through a scene with all the spotlights trained upon her. So she played it to the hilt. 

The audience had gathered already. 

Apart from her aunt, only a threadbare few cousins remained to represent the Baranovsky family – for what Hitler hadn't done to her family, Stalin had finished off. (Lilia was quietly glad that she had chosen to keep her own name, even though, like other Bolshoi ballerinas before her, she had made the decision for different reasons.)

Yet the paucity of Baranovskys was counterbalanced by a profusion of Feltsmans. As a family they had been Muscovites since before the Revolution, and seemingly untouched by the Terror – though she would never have dreamt of asking Yakov, and it felt gauche even to wonder. Lilia was embraced and exclaimed over by a flood of cousins of all possible descriptions and uncles and aunties unspecified. Their delight in welcoming her to their family would have seemed unconditional had it not been for the occasional mention of how very difficult it was to get good tickets to the ballet. (This was forgivable because it was true.)

Lilia might not have had much family at the wedding, but she did have the whole of the Bolshoi Ballet company. However her fellow dancers might have felt about Lilia, secretly or not so secretly, no one had apparently been interested in turning down the invitation. Even the artistic director was there, chatting amiably with Yakov's coach. In her heart Lilia couldn't entirely believe that Yuri Nikolayevich actually remembered her name from one week to the next, but here he was at her wedding. _And after all, he promoted me to soloist, didn't he?_

She glanced cautiously towards them and drifted in their direction, wondering exactly what sort of conversation she ought to make. Politically. To curry favor. To convince him to send her on tour, even. At the very least she ought to thank Yuri Nikolayevich for coming. 

Although Yakov's coach gave her a disapproving look, Yuri Nikolayevich smiled.

"Shouldn't you be offstage, Lilia?" he said. "Aren't you spoiling your entrance?"

"Do you think that I ought to go and hide in the bathroom instead?" 

She actually got a laugh in response. It was her first known success at delivering a line of light banter. It so took her aback that, caught between Yuri Nikolayevich's expectant look and Oleg Petrovich's unencouraging one, she could think of nothing else to say.

Hopelessly tongue-tied, she stumbled through a few rote words of gratitude and then took her own advice. She stayed in the small bathroom – studying herself in the unforgiving fluorescent-lit mirror and listening to the excited murmur of the conversation outside – until her aunt came to extract her from it.

"They're ready to start, Lilenka!" she said. "Everyone's waiting for you."

Her aunt shepherded Lilia through the crowds of guests. Someone said a few words that she didn't catch; someone's hand brushed her shoulder; someone else touched the small of her back with the easy intimacy of a fellow dancer accustomed to partnering. She didn't care who it was. She hardly noticed any of it, because Yakov was standing by the door of the ceremony room. 

How could he be more handsome every time she saw him? Poised, confident, strong, obviously at the peak of his competitive form. He wore that impeccably tailored suit of his; his hair was carefully slicked down.

"You're here," he said, reaching out to clasp her hands.

"Where else would I be?" replied Lilia. She studied him. "You got your hair cut."

"Of course I did." He paused. "Because Oleg Petrovich made me."

They linked arms – as they had done only a month earlier on the winding paths of Gorky Park – and they went in together to meet their fate.

***

Without her training, Lilia had no idea how she would have made it through the ceremony, disciplined herself to stand still and graceful and poised while brimming over with anticipation and nervous energy. It wasn't until Yakov took her hand to slip the ring onto her finger that she felt she could allow herself to breathe visibly. It wasn't until she felt the warmth of his lips pressed against hers that she knew all of this was real and not pretend. Because it wasn't a stage kiss.

Her lips were still tingling from the kiss when they stepped out of the wedding palace into the shock of the January wind. Lilia clutched at her veil, fearing that it would blow off of her head into the grey sky. They had to stand there shivering even though a line of cars stood waiting at the curb with their engines running. No one could go anywhere until the photographers – all jockeying for position, some half kneeling on the icy sidewalk – had finished their work.

A small group of determined spectators had gathered outside the wedding palace. Although it was nothing like the crowds that had greeted Valentina Tereshkova's wedding – Lilia, thirteen at the time, had made a secret scrapbook of all the pictures from the magazines – it was still more people than she had ever expected. By the time she and Yakov finished signing autographs for everyone who wanted, her hands were so cold that she could barely hold a pen.

She climbed hurriedly into the waiting car, followed by Yakov, and hardly noticed who shut the door after them. For the first time since his proposal in Gorky Park, they were alone together. Yakov reached over to take her hands in his, pressing them together.

"Well!" he exclaimed, as if it was a full sentence in itself. "Well."

He looked across at her, his face serious but a tenderness shining in his blue eyes.

"What is it?" asked Lilia, struck shy.

"Have you got it out of your system yet? Wanting to be married to me. It's been..." He checked his watch. "...at least twenty minutes already."

Lilia laughed. "I think I should wait a little longer before deciding."

"You know what Oleg Petrovich said to me? _Why don't you just take that girl camping in the Crimea next summer and get it out of your system?_ " He paused. "I told him maybe he should go to hell and get that out of his system."

"You didn't."

"No, I didn't," he admitted. "Obviously. But he knew what I was thinking."

"If I started telling people to go to hell," said Lilia, "I'd never stop."

"I didn't need to say it. I've married you. Now they can't keep us apart."

He took her hand and held it so tightly that it almost hurt. Lilia held her breath. Ever since their engagement – their plans to buy a cooperative apartment in Moscow notwithstanding – she had half been wondering whether Yakov would try to insist that she leave the Bolshoi to be nearer to him.

"Yasha," she said cautiously, "you're leaving for Leningrad in three days."

"You know what I mean," he grumbled affectionately, and kissed her on the cheek.

***

Three days of bliss together. They'd had all sorts of plans. To go to the Tretyakov Museum, to see a play at the Maly Theatre, to try cross-country skiing together. Maybe even go to the Bolshoi. Lilia had no personal desire to see Natalia Igorevna dance on her evening off, but Yakov (as she well knew) dearly loved ballet, and she liked the idea of being able to grace her husband – her _husband_! – with complementary tickets.

In the end they made it only to the Maly, because Lilia had already stood in line for tickets, and to a Young Pioneer sport festival, because the price for Yakov's brief release from training was a command appearance handing out medals. This was meant to take two hours. In fact it took all afternoon. Lilia stood to one side and watched Yakov being mobbed by an overexcited rhythmic gymnastics team, all giggles and exclamations and meaningful looks. Had she been that blatant when she was sixteen? Probably she had. She felt the same way now; she had just gotten better at hiding it.

Lilia's four complementary tickets to _The Fountain of Bakhchisarai_ went to Yakov's father, mother, brother and sister-in-law. While her new family was enjoying the Bolshoi Ballet, Lilia was lying at full length in bed enjoying their son. There was something about indecently decadent about being able to make love horizontally with one's own husband at one's leisure. He was hers now, hers, hers. She repeated this to herself in a whisper when he was asleep, trying to make herself believe it. 

It was easier to believe when he was there beside her. But after their three days of bliss, Yakov was back at the Yubileyni Sports Palace, training for the world championships, and Lilia was back at the Bolshoi, back in her communal corps de ballet apartment across the back alley from the theatre. 

They had put their names on the list for a cooperative apartment that would be ready in three years. In the mean time, a sublet would be found for them, they were assured... but obviously not immediately. Nor could they claim to need it immediately, since Yakov would be in Leningrad until he retired from competition.

It was sometimes difficult to believe that all of it hadn't been a dream. When alone in her little kitchen, Lilia sometimes sat and studied the wedding photographs, trying to persuade herself otherwise. This time she wasn't staring at the blurry halftones from the magazines, but the crisp, glossy prints that had kindly been sent to them afterwards by the _Ogonyok_ correspondent: Yakov in his best suit, sliding the ring onto her finger while she watched seriously and expectantly, her hair half hidden under a white lace veil. The backdrop to the photograph was provided by a row of worthy, serious men in dark suits, Yakov's coach standing alongside officials from the Sports Club and the Skating Federation and the State Committee for Sports and Physical Education of the USSR, all of them looking on with grim approval as if they personally had arranged the marriage all for the glory of the Soviet state.

 _Maybe it means I'm safe now,_ thought Lilia giddily. _Maybe they can't touch me now._

And yet she knew also how many men so much more important than these, infinitely more important than Yakov and herself, had disappeared from photographs – and from life – without a trace. Nothing was forever.

***

Lilia hardly had the time to miss Yakov. 

She was preparing for her first title role: Juliet in Prokofiev's _Romeo and Juliet_. Every day she and her partner were personally coached by Galina Sergeyevna, the daughter of the Imperial Ballet, the Hero of Socialist Labor, the great ballerina who had created the role herself. As a girl Lilia had watched the film on television every time it was broadcast. This was her chance to make her mark: a beautiful ballet, an exquisite score. The tickets for her opening night – _her_ opening night, for of course she was in the second cast – were already sold out.

So there was no pressure, none at all.

"Think of young love," said Galina Sergeyevna in the rehearsal studio, a gentle rebuke as she interrupted Lilia mid-arabesque. The subtle movement of her arms was unassuming, delicate, exquisite. "That shy, tentative, ecstatic feeling..."

She was nearly sixty, a slightly plump old woman with waved, greying hair, wearing a twinset and a pencil skirt and sensible shoes. She had last danced Juliet ten years ago. Despite the rumors, she had (so Lilia believed) never married. And yet her lightly sketched movements were infinitely more expressive of young love than Lilia's had ever been.

"You know the feeling," she concluded. "You must."

Lilia, struck dumb, pressed her lips together and shook her head.

Semyon, her partner, laughed. "How long ago was the wedding, Lilia?"

"Three weeks," said Lilia. "But what does that have to do with anything? This isn't Verona."

"Of course not," he said, a little smirk of amusement. "I guess he's no Romeo either."

Lilia couldn't dignify this with a reply. Being no fool, Yakov was better than Romeo in every possible way, but this was no business of Semyon's – and this was the message she had intended to convey from the start. Obviously having failed to do so, she settled for glaring at him.

Of course Galina Sergeyevna was far above all of this. She simply gestured towards the pianist. "Again. From the _soutenu_. Please."

So that was the end of the matter. 

***

 _Lilia Baranovskaya is a revelation on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre,_ said the reviews afterwards. _She is a youthful and technically brilliant Juliet: haughty and assured rather than vulnerable, embodying the challenging, vibrant score if perhaps not entirely embodying the role. But this is a trifling criticism in the end, because her future as a star of the Bolshoi Ballet is clearly assured. One would like to see her dancing Odile in Swan Lake. No doubt it will happen soon._

Even though the reviews were good – they were great, said Yakov – all the criticisms still stung, because they were true.

The critiques she received from her fellow dancers were a good bit more personal. Lingering backstage after a rehearsal a few days later, she overheard Semyon talking to Masha – and froze where she was, half concealed by a fold of the curtain.

"She doesn't know the first thing about star-crossed lovers," Semyon was declaring. "She just looked around and hooked the most important man she could find. I feel sorry for him."

"I feel sorry for both of them," said Masha. "Having to live hundreds of miles apart? I don't call that a real marriage. It isn't right."

Semyon ignored this. "And he isn't even all that important. A figure skater? A bronze medal? Five years from now, no one will even remember his name."

Rage burned in Lilia's chest with the heat of a coal from the heart of the fire. How dare he? Who on earth did he think _he_ was? She disentangled herself from the curtain with a quick movement.

"No one walking out of this _theater_ tonight will remember your name without looking it up in the program, Sema!"

Semyon gave her a disdainful look, utterly without surprise, as if he'd known full well that she had been listening. "You know why people love you on stage, Lil'ka? Because it means you have to keep your mouth shut."

Because she couldn't slap him, she turned on her heel and walked away. 

And yet of course she danced as his partner that night, and the next, until the end of the run. She would never have dreamt of doing anything else.


	7. Chapter 7

A month later, at morning class, Lilia fell out of her pirouettes three times in a row.

"Sloppy, Baranovskaya!" snapped the ballet master.

A few of the other girls smirked, pleased to see her brought down to earth. Usually she got more than her share of corrections: the sort that implied she was particularly worthy of notice. Today all he showed was impatience.

It wasn't sloppiness on her part; it was just that she was faintly dizzy. She had felt that way since she got up that morning, unable to shake a strange, metallic edge of nausea. Afterwards she leaned back on the barre, breathing hard, watching other _corps_ girls easily dance their way through a combination that ought to have been elementary for her. She blotted at the sweat on her forehead with her discarded shirt – an old one of Yakov's that she had borrowed without permission.

"What's wrong?" said Nastya in an undertone, lounging next to her.

Lilia shrugged. "Nothing."

"You just can't turn now?"

"I guess I ate something that didn't agree with me. I don't feel right."

Next morning it was exactly the same thing. It was embarassing. Everyone noticed.

Afterwards she went to the cafeteria for lunch, where she sat staring mournfully at a chicken cutlet and a small pile of the blandest stewed carrots in existence. Even the smell of boiled cabbage made her stomach want to turn over.

Masha sat down beside her, thumping a hearty plate of steaming beef stew onto the table. Lilia half turned her head away.

"Are you all right? Nastya said you weren't feeling well in class, yesterday or today."

"I just feel a little sick to my stomach," admitted Lilia. "But it's nothing."

Masha gave her a serious look, as if it were something important rather than a minor stomach bug. "Have you... have your guests come to visit recently?" 

It was a ridiculous euphemism, thought Lilia, but she wasn't going to pretend that she didn't know what Masha meant.

"No, but that doesn't mean anything."

Even at the Academy they'd had whispered discussions about 'guests coming to visit,' cramps and hot water bottles and the horrors of having to wear white tights on the wrong day of the month. But she was a dancer; these things weren't always regular for dancers and they certainly weren't for her. She knew enough to know that. 

"It can," insisted Masha, as if Lilia were a bit slow. "It does when you have a baby on the way."

"I couldn't," said Lilia, horrified.

"Why not? You have a husband, don't you?"

Lilia racked her brains but she couldn't think of any good reason. She had just... assumed. It was impossible for her to be pregnant now – she'd just become a soloist! It couldn't happen. It mustn't happen. It probably wasn't happening anyway. And if it was happening, no doubt it would sort itself out. 

For several weeks she told herself this. In morning classes, when she could keep the nausea at bay, she jumped higher and more vigorously than ever before, hoping that it would perhaps shake something loose. Her breasts ached with every jolt. Probably this was just because her period was due, she told herself, although they had hardly ever cost her the slightest twinge before this. And stubbornly her period still refused to come.

During breaks in rehearsals she lingered in the hallways, smoking cigarette after cigarette. At first she'd only smoked out of curiosity, out of a desire for the experience – then, somehow, she had discovered that she couldn't live without them. All in all, it was the same way she felt about Yakov.

Oh God. Yakov. He couldn't have. She couldn't be. Her body was everything to her; it wouldn't betray her now. But he – he had...

***

Three days later she was sick backstage halfway through a dress rehearsal of _Sleeping Beauty_. She was dancing the Lilac Fairy. Grisha had to hold her tiara so that it wouldn't slide off her head into the grimy sink, stained with paint and grease. Everyone saw.

Afterwards Lilia sagged in the dressing room, chills beginning to claim her body even while the fresh sweat still prickled on her skin. She felt queasy with revulsion. _Lilia, what on earth are you thinking? What are you going to do? How long can you possibly...?_ A horror had begun to creep over her that perhaps she was already too late.

Masha stuck her head around the door of the dressing room, wrapped in a brightly-colored kimono that she had brought back from Japan last summer.

"Are you still in here? Don't hide, no one cares that you were sick! Someone said they just posted the list for the French tour. Come on!"

Lilia allowed herself to be pulled to her feet and dragged down the hallway, although really she wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. With her arm tucked firmly into Masha's, she essayed the question that had been haunting her.

"Masha, how long does a woman have to do something if she... you know... if her guests still haven't arrived?"

"Oh, months and months," said Masha dismissively, taking the stairs two at a time, her mind fixed on foreign tours.

 _Months,_ thought Lilia. _So there's plenty of time. If you need the time. Really you don't even know for certain that..._

The green baize notice board at the bottom of the stairs had begun to exert its magnetic pull upon her own mind, a deeper and more familiar terror beginning to swallow up her vague and unformed anxiety. It was almost a relief, like the return of an old friend. She knew every thought by heart. Why even bother looking at the board? There was no point. They would never let her go her abroad. Never.

Over Masha's shoulder, the long list of names was a roll call of privilege. Lilia wasn't close enough to read them. It was just as well.

"Get out of the _way_ , Masha," she heard herself saying, as if from a distance, and found herself shoving forward into a non-existent gap between two sweat-damp bodies.

And suddenly a name stood out from the blur on the page. _Lilia Mikhailovna Baranovskaya._

Lilia shook her head and tried to read down the list again from the start. But it wasn't easy; the letters had begun to swim before her eyes.

"Well, don't faint," said Semyon impatiently. "It's not like you've been awarded the Order of Lenin. Sit down and put your head between your legs if you have to."

For the first and only time in her life, Lilia did as Semyon said. Escaping the crowd somehow, she collapsed into an old rickety chair – as loose at the joints as she could ever wish to be – and let the excited chatter of the rest of the company recede into the distance alongside the rushing of the blood in her ears. As her vision began to clear, she stared at the underside of the chair, where a stagehand had roughly chalked a three-digit number. Perhaps it was the last abandoned remnant of some long-ago production. Well, she wasn't going to end up like that. 

Lilia, you need to grow up, she told herself. _This is about more than your personal concerns. It's your responsibility to the company and to the Soviet people to be at your best for the tour. It's like you're dancing on an injury. You can't bury your head in the sand forever._

When she sat up again, her mind was suddenly clear. She got to her feet and found herself accepting a perfunctory kiss on each cheek from Nastya.

"Well, I guess they couldn't leave you off," said Nastya, which might almost have been a compliment.

"I guess not," said Lilia in wonderment.

***

That afternoon she called and made an appointment. She went to the clinic two days later. The doctor was a middle-aged woman with greying hair pulled back from her fleshy face, a mouth that sagged at the corners. She examined Lilia quickly and untenderly, then looked at her with disapproval over the form she was filling in.

"Lilia Mikhailovna Baranovskaya," she said, as if even Lilia's name tasted bitter in her mouth. "How old?"

"Nineteen," said Lilia. "I'll be twenty next month."

"Married?"

"Yes." 

"Any other children?"

"No."

"Any illnesses?"

"No."

"So why do you want an abortion?"

"Because I'm a ballet dancer," said Lilia. "It's impossible for me to be pregnant now. I have to go on tour this summer."

The doctor shook her head. "You shouldn't think only of yourself, Lilia Mikhailovna. Think of the happiness of your family."

"My family?" echoed Lilia, who had hardly started to think of herself as having one. "My husband is a sportsman. He understands."

"You might think that now, but trust me, nothing can bring you happiness like a child. You're a young, healthy, married woman. Someday you'll regret..."

"Not becoming a great ballerina," said Lilia. "That's the only thing I could ever regret."

The doctor looked at Lilia as if she were a depraved, utterly heartless woman, already lost at nineteen to a healthy Soviet family life as wife and mother, her soul sacrificed to the dissipations of ballet. Perhaps it had been. Lilia didn't care.

The doctor shook her head, clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and signed the form. "On your head be it, comrade. You can come to the hospital on Friday. You'll need to stay for three days."

"Three _days_?" said Lilia despairingly.

***

Going to the doctor was easy compared to going to the artistic director. 

He sat behind a desk so broad that it would have served amply as a barricade during the Revolution, rifling impatiently through an untidy stack of papers. It was starting to slide to one side; a total collapse was clearly imminent. Lilia, who was perched in a chair trying not to wring her hands, wondered whether he had forgotten she was there.

"Well, Baranovskaya?" he said finally. "I hope you're not here for entertainment, because I'm certainly not."

"No, Yuri Nikolayevich. I – I wanted to tell you that I can't perform on Friday."

"Can't _perform_? Are you injured?"

"No," she said, suffering inward agonies. Why on earth did she have to speak to a man about this? Not that speaking to Galina Sergeyevna would have been any better. "I need to go on a... on a trip. But only for three days. I'll be back on Monday."

He gave her a knowing look. "A three day trip, hmm?"

"Yes," said Lilia miserably.

"Half the _corps de ballet_ this year!" he said to himself. "Dancers!"

She sat demurely with her nails digging into the flesh of her palm.

"Well, go then. But when you step into morning class on Monday you'd better..."

"You won't be able to tell that I was away," promised Lilia.

 _But I will,_ she thought to herself. _I'll know._

***

An intercity telephone call. Even if Yakov and Lilia had been able to justify the expense of speaking more than once a week, his coaches never would have allowed it at the height of his competitive season. So it was only the night before her appointment that Lilia finally spoke to her husband.

He didn't seem to want to talk about his own training regime, for which Lilia was just as glad. Instead she was treated to a lengthy diatribe about the injustice of the fact that he wouldn't be able to travel to see her dance the Lilac Fairy in Moscow.

"And why should I be kept under lock and key in Leningrad anyway? What's the point? What good does it do my morale? No one considers that. No one thinks about the psychology of the situation at all. They're all just..."

"Yasha, don't," said Lilia sharply. 

She was under no illusions. Both his telephone and hers would have come with the inevitable bug in the receiver. Besides which, she had heard this rant of Yakov's about the figure skating federation before. She knew how it ended, with either _they're all just slave-drivers_ or _they're all just fascists_. He had a talent for hyperbole. Neither – to put it mildly – was acceptable to say over the phone.

Yakov grunted a sullen acknowledgment. "You know."

Lilia sighed. "Yes." Then she drew a breath. "Besides, you won't be able to come to see me dance _Romeo and Juliet_ in Paris either. They just posted the list for the tour."

"Well, there you are!" He sounded heartily satisfied, as if he had just unwrapped a long-anticipated gift. "Lilechka, I told you they'd send you, didn't I?"

"You could try sounding just a _little_ surprised."

"Why? I'm not at all surprised. They wouldn't dare pass you over now."

Of course Lilia herself had been stunned, but she could hardly allude to the reasons over the phone. She fell back upon a simpler objection.

"That's just what Nastya said!"

"But it's true! You can't blame me just because Nastya and I both happen to be right!"

Lilia couldn't help laughing at him – but her laughter suddenly drained away as she remembered that she had other news that she had to share with him.

"There's one other thing," she said. "For the past few weeks I've been feeling a little... well, not quite right."

"Oh?"

She continued almost without drawing breath, not wanting to leave Yakov a chance to cut in. "So I went to the doctor and she told me I was pregnant. But don't worry, I'm going to take care of it. I'm going to the hospital tomorrow. They're making me stay for three days."

There was a silence.

"Because of course," she added, "it's not like I could..."

Yakov interrupted before she could finish the sentence. "Because of the tour. Because of Paris."

"Yes."

This wasn't exactly what she had meant but she was prepared to pretend that it was.

There was another silence.

"Of course you have to go on tour," said Yakov finally. "And I guess there's plenty of time. Once we're both retired..."

Lilia made a noise of assent without needing to think too much about it. Yakov might be thinking that this was his last season, but her own retirement would be years and years away. Decades. It might as well be centuries. They would probably have succeeded in building communism by then. So there was no need for her to worry about what might or might not happen in that far-off future.

She looked at her watch. Their allotted ten minutes had flown quickly. For once she was glad.

"Yasha, it's..."

"Time to say goodbye, isn't it? I have to go to practice now."

"Yes. I'll call you next week at the usual time."

"I'll be here. Lilechka, I love you."

"I love you too," she whispered into the mouthpiece, unable to bring herself to voice the words aloud. Every time it felt as if she were signing a confession.

"And I..."

"What?"

"Never mind," said Yakov. "Just – I love you. That's all."

***

All of life seemed to be contained within the hospital ward where Lilia found herself. Two rows of ten beds, twenty women, changing by the day, all laughing or joking or lamenting. It was as if she had found herself within a short story, surrounded by every character imaginable: the mother of six, the wife of the district party official, the Azeri university student, the factory supervisor, the woman who worked in the train drivers' canteen at Arbatskaya station. And herself not least among them: the dark-haired Jewish ballet dancer, scarcely more than a girl. 

The other women fussed over her, as if they thought she was delicate. They asked her to tell them stories about the Bolshoi Theatre, expecting tales of seduction and betrayal as if she were a demimondaine in nineteenth-century Paris. She felt she was disappointing them in not suffering from tuberculosis.

Lilia wasn't delicate at all. On her first day in the hospital, still aching from the surgery, she was happy to have a rest, and lay obediently in her bed reading Seventeen Moments of Spring while the noisy life of the ward swirled around her. But on the second day, although she still felt the cramps, she woke up restless. 

In the ward bathroom, painted an institutional green, she began to warm up in her hospital slippers while she ran the bath. She threw her towel over the radiator, whose bare metal was burning hot, so that she could use it as a barre. By the time that someone started banging impatiently on the door, the bath had grown cold and Lilia still hadn't so much as dipped a toe into it. She sighed and went out again in her nightgown.

Everyone was in a hurry because it was soon to be visiting hour. Lilia didn't care. She sat in her bed – because the nurses insisted that she sit in her bed – and pointed and flexed her toes under the sheet. No one would be coming to visit her. She had told no one apart from Yakov where she was, and Yakov was in Leningrad, so she merely sat and watched the bustling visiting hour unfold before her.

The exhausted woman who came shepherding a solemn little girl and two rambunctious twin toddlers to their mother's side. The young man in an ill-fitting private's uniform, already drunk at 11 in the morning, who began to quarrel with his (one assumed) girlfriend until voices began to be raised and the nurses had to step in. And the man in a fedora and a trench coat who stepped through the door at the far end of the ward carrying a laughably enormous bouquet of roses.

It couldn't be, but the man looked strangely like...

"What on earth are you doing here?" said Lilia to Yakov as he came across to her bed.

"It's my rest day today," he said. "I came on the overnight train and I'll go back tonight. I'll be back in time for practice tomorrow morning if I take a taxi straight from the station. What Oleg Petrovich doesn't know... and even if he does know..."

"But it's so silly," she said, "There was no reason. And those roses! It wasn't a performance, Yasha."

"But I wanted to see you." He sat on the bed next to her, laid the flowers down on the sheet and his hat beside them. "How are you feeling, Lilechka?"

She didn't realise it until she felt his weight bending the mattress beside her, but heavens how she wanted him. She ached for him to reach out and stroke her head, to lean against him and feel him running his fingers through her hair. To have him murmur soothing, meaningless words to her. It was so childish. She was hardly in pain at all. It had been different yesterday, but it didn't matter. There was no point in holding onto things like that.

"I'm fine," she said. "I can't believe they're keeping me cooped up here for another day. There's nothing at all wrong with me."

"You know," he offered tentatively, "they say that an abortion can be good for athletic performance. It increases your blood supply. And they say that the hormones make you more flexible."

"Do they? Well, I hope they're right. Maybe it will make up for the days I'm missing morning class."

Yakov had started rummaging around inside his coat. "I thought," he said, producing a lump of something wrapped in a handkerchief, "that they probably weren't feeding you very well here. Hospital dinners. I remember from when I had my knee done. So I brought you a few things. You have to keep up your strength."

Lilia cautiously pulled back a corner of the handkerchief. Inside was a piece of cheese. From another pocket came a _kolbasa_ sausage, from another a half loaf of rye bread, from another a thermos of tea, and finally some Kara-Kum chocolates. The capacity of his coat was staggering. The rye was as dense as lead and the kolbasa almost the size of her forearm (which admittedly was not all that substantial). Once Yakov retired, he could consider taking up a second career as a black market smuggler. 

"You ridiculous man," said Lilia. "I'm embarassed to be seen with you."

"Well, if you don't want me here, I can always go and see my mother instead. She appreciates _kolbasa_ with fennel and caraway. You know I had to go to a special store to get this."

He was joking. Probably. Certainly she had been joking. But there was a slight note of injury in his voice.

She reached out to him and grasped his hand, squeezing it hard. "Yasha."

They sat silently together, holding hands, until the visiting hour was over.

***

He left with some parting words to her from the doorway that she couldn't make out. Lilia sat blinking as the ward quieted around her, like the still evening after a long, hot day. 

She found herself thinking enviously of Yakov's mother, and the rest of the Feltsman family, who would presumably be enjoying his company for the rest of his flying visit to Moscow. He would even be able to stay to dinner before getting on the overnight sleeper back to Leningrad. Meanwhile she, his wife... 

After some time she became conscious of the fact that the woman in the bed next to her, the one who had six children, was looking in her direction.

"My husband is Yakov Feltsman," Lilia said, thinking that she had recognised him and was wondering from where. "He's a figure skater."

"Oh, is he? I don't have any time to watch sport." She paused. "But not every man would think of bringing something for you. Mine wouldn't. You have a good husband."

"I suppose I do," said Lilia with faint surprise. 

It wasn't that she had failed to recognised Yakov's sterling qualities; it was just that it still felt strange to hear them connected to herself.

"Doesn't drink? Doesn't hit you?"

"No. Of course not."

"A very good husband," said the woman conclusively.

"You should take some of this _kolbasa_ home," replied Lilia. "I'm never going to be able to eat it all by myself."


	8. Chapter 8

Yakov came home from the 1969 Figure Skating World Championships in Colorado Springs with new American jeans for himself and his brother and – wonder of wonders – for Lilia herself. She had hardly ever worn jeans before.

Yakov came home from the Figure Skating World Championships with records tucked into the lining of his suitcase – The Beatles, Cream, The Moody Blues, so many songs to which he would never skate and she would never dance. (Never on stage at least. He waltzed her around and around their little sitting room to the soaring strings of _Nights in White Satin_ , and she didn't have to know English to understand the meaning of the words.)

Yakov came home from the Figure Skating World Championships with two precious boxes of Tampax. ("Just ask for it in a shop," Lilia had said firmly in response to his puzzled look. "They'll know what it is." And so they had.)

Yakov came home from the Figure Skating World Championships with a collection of scrapes and bruises, a seventh-place finish, and a knee so badly re-injured that at first he could barely make it down the stairs from their third-floor apartment without leaning on the handrail for support. "American ice is treacherous," he said. But it hardly mattered, did it? He was never going to compete again.

Yakov came home to Moscow, to retirement – and to Lilia.

***

In the autumn he would be starting his degree at the State Academy of Physical Culture, a full-time program. Until then, Yakov was almost a free man. Perhaps it was the perfect start for a marriage, having a husband who wasn't working. Unlike Semyon he would never ask her to darn his tights.

He superintended their move into a sublet in Belyayevo, where they would be living until their cooperative apartment was ready. He argued with movers and delivery men; he painted their two-room apartment in cheerful colors; he hit his fingers with a hammer trying to put up shelves and hang paintings. He taught her to drive his car, patiently instructing her as they made endless, slow circles around the new tower blocks of their district, with children gazing curiously after them. He taught skating lessons at Gorky Park four afternoons a week, until the ice became too slushy even for the most dedicated. 

He was taking a preparatory course in human anatomy and physiology. When she came home from rehearsals she found him frowning with concentration over his heavy textbooks. He rang his sister-in-law Rosa, who was a doctor, to demand explanations of obscure points of physiology. When Lilia was sitting in front of the television in the evening, trying to watch _Adjutant to His Excellency_ , he used her as a study aid. In an undertone he listed the small bones of her hand and wrist, bending close as if he were cataloguing precious treasures. He kissed her in the most obscure spots, naming them as he went – the inferior lumbar triangle, the internal abdominal oblique. He grasped her ankle in his hand and stretched her leg through its full range of motion, studying the movement of the muscles and tendons beneath her skin. Lilia, who was trying to concentrate on the love story between Pasha and Tanya, unconsciously pointed her toes.

"Now you're not studying," she protested, trying to stifle a giggle. "You're just distracting yourself. Can't you look at your own leg? You have all the same muscles – and they're bigger than mine!"

"You're my secret weapon," said Yakov, releasing her ankle again. "The other students say they're bored to tears, but I remember it all because it makes me think of you."

But he was restless, clearly not used to having so much time on his hands. He set rules for himself, schedules that he amended almost by the day, trying to develop the perfect balance of work, study, domestic responsibility and exercise. He did vigorous sit-ups and push-ups every morning as soon as he got out of bed, which went better for him once he agreed to move the venue from bedroom to sitting room. He experimented with meal plans, which at least had the advantage that he did most of the cooking and food shopping, even if she did sometimes disagree with his nutritional views. 

"You've been talking for a whole year about how much you wanted to retire!" said Lilia over a breakfast of cottage cheese with sour cream and jam. "Now you don't know what to do with yourself."

"I'm not going to let myself vegetate and decay just because I've stopped competing," he insisted. "I won't be one of those old coaches who turns into a potato, even if I do end up going bald." 

Lilia forgave him because she knew, when it came down to it, that it would have been no different for her. Not that she was ever planning to retire.

***

The greatest privilege of his retirement, said Yakov, was that he was now free to go to the ballet whenever he wanted.

Sometimes he came to the Bolshoi Theatre as often as she performed, whether or not she was dancing the leading role, three or four times in the week. It was both strange and wonderful to know that there was someone in the audience for whom she represented a real person, not merely a figure of delight or abstract critique. She never asked him where he would be sitting, so that whichever way she looked in the theatre – chest heaving, applause ringing in her ears – she could imagine that she was gazing at her husband.

Afterwards she would quickly remove her makeup and shower and dress, anticipating the reunion with him as if it were another sort of curtain. She had no time for backstage gossip when she knew her Yasha was waiting for her. When she had first joined the company, the exit from the stage door into the dark and chilly alley behind the Bolshoi had been something to be endured. The only thing worse than having admirers awaiting her with outstretched bouquets and embarassing praise (along with even more embarassing requests) was having no one waiting at all. But now she had Yakov, so there was no need to worry about a surprise invitation to dinner unless he was feeling in a particularly extravagant mood.

"That was your best yet," he said on the closing night of Sleeping Beauty. It wasn't the first time he'd said the same thing. "Stronger than ever."

"More beautiful than ever," put in one of her stage door regulars, as if he knew better than her husband.

"Strength _is_ beauty," said Lilia archly.

As usual, Yakov had parked his Lada just around the corner. Yawning with the lateness of the hour, he slid into the passenger seat; Lilia took the wheel because her blood was still fizzing with the adrenalin of performance. Also she knew that she needed the practice.

"I've heard of people marrying for money," said Lilia once they had made it safely onto the Garden Ring, warily watching a passing convoy of canvas-covered army trucks, even though they were two lanes away and the road was practically empty at that hour. She handled the stick gingerly, still afraid of grinding the gears of Yakov's precious car. "I've heard of people marrying for a residence permit or marrying into the _nomenklatura_. But I've never before heard of anyone who married to get free tickets to the ballet."

Yakov laughed. "Do you think I've sold myself too cheaply?"

"Definitely. But at least you had the good taste to hold out for the Bolshoi instead of the Kirov."

"Lilechka, I held out for you. Because, you know, you're not the first ballet dancer I..."

He leaned towards her and began to kiss her neck. The Lada swerved almost imperceptibly towards the army convoy. Although she never crossed the lane markers, this was too much for Lilia, who was as much of a perfectionist on the road as she was on the stage.

"Yasha, stop it! I'm trying to drive! This is a serious responsibility!"

But as soon as they got home, she felt differently. One kiss on every landing on their way upstairs: this was their solemn rule, and one which they broke, to a greater or lesser extent, almost every night that Yakov came to see her at the Bolshoi. Once they shut the door of their own apartment, they could do as they liked. And they did. Repeatedly.

***

All of this was what Lilia had expected of marriage, all she had hoped for and dreamt about. So much of the rest, it had never occurred to her to anticipate. 

Even when she was a tiny girl, her aunt had never hugged her. The idea would have seemed bizarre to both of them. At the academy the other girls had held hands, sat on each other's laps, leaned easily together when they shared their secrets as if nothing could be more natural – but Lilia, without consciously holding herself aloof, had always found herself on the outside.

If it hadn't been for brief, impersonal corrections in class, no one ever would have touched Lilia. What she would have done she hadn't started partnering classes at thirteen, she didn't know. As it was, she had survived on crumbs until she met Yakov, on crumbs that she hadn't even realised were crumbs.

Living with Yakov was like having a feast set for her, without shame or stinting. If she did so much as stretch or sigh in the night, he would roll over, still half asleep, and pull her into his arms. In the morning, after he was finished with his calisthenic routine, he would bring her a cup of tea in bed. Many days she woke to find him stroking her hair. Over the breakfast table he would reach out to take her hand, as if two feet of distance were too much separation.

It was a surfeit of joy, undeserved, almost unimaginable, so much that it left her feeling unbalanced. A note of tension remained in her shoulders when she leaned against him. _How long can he possibly go on loving me like this?_

***

Of course they argued all the time: it was the one sport in which they could engage in spirited competition on an equal playing field. But their first real argument came on the day that Lilia's mother died. Her real mother.

One dreary, sloppy afternoon she had picked her way through the drizzle and slush to her aunt's apartment. She was wearing her short boots but yesterday's unseasonably late snowfall had been badly cleared away and was only half melted. She shivered as the dampness began to soak into her socks. Much though she hated to admit it (and would never admit it to him), Yakov had been right.

When she stepped into the apartment, her aunt didn't stand aside like she usually did. Instead she stayed by the door, a frown gathering force on her face like the storm clouds that were piled in the east. Lilia looked involuntarily down at her feet, wondering if she was going to hear the same thing from her aunt that she had already heard from Yakov earlier today. She bent down and hurriedly unlaced her boots, hoping that her socks were not too obviously wet. When she straightened up, her aunt was still frowning.

"What is it?" said Lilia.

"Lilenka, your mother died."

It came out as a quick slap of words, all in one breath. Lilia bent over again to straighten one of her boots, which had fallen onto its side. Still bending, she looked up. Her aunt's thin hands were on a level with her eyes, tensed together, the tendons sharply visible.

"They're burying her in Magadan," she added.

Lilia straightened up. The tile was chill on her wet feet. She wondered how her aunt knew. Had someone written or called to tell her? And if so, who could that possibly be? It was easier to believe in a link of the spirit, some mysterious unwanted tendril of connection between her aunt and the brother's wife whom she had never really liked. But no, that connection was Lilia herself. The uncollected parcel. Left luggage.

Her aunt sighed and shook her head as if Lilia had said something. "She had twenty years more than some people."

It felt as if this were a message to be passed on to another Lilia. Another Lilia who would know what to say, how to feel.

"Don't just _stand_ there," said her aunt. 

"Well, I don't know what you want me to do," said Lilia.

Her aunt made an impatient noise, a huff of breath through thin lips. It occurred to Lilia, for the first time in her life, that her aunt didn't know what to do either. It was almost unbelievable, impossible to contemplate. And she, Lilia...

"I suppose we ought to have our tea," she said.

Her aunt made no move towards the kitchen. Her face was pale. Lilia studied her.

"Just a touch of headache," said her aunt.

"So I'll get the tea then."

Lilia knew her aunt's kitchen as well as her own. Better, in fact; her own kitchen had been hers for barely a couple of months. Nonetheless she found herself standing and staring at the two shelves of dishes above the sink as if she'd never seen them before in her life. As if she were the one who'd spent years in the Gulag and then a decade in Siberia. Her fingertips were tingling; she couldn't quite recognise them as belonging to her. 

She stood there in suspended animation until her aunt's sharp, familiar voice brought her back to the present.

"Lil'ka! What on earth are you doing in there?"

With a sigh, Lilia slowly began to gather the things for tea.

***

When she got home, Yakov was in the sitting room polishing a pair of skates that didn't really need polishing and whistling tunelessly along with a Shostakovich symphony on the radio. He got to his feet and kissed her as soon as she came into the room.

"Well, how was tea?" he asked, once he'd finished kissing her to his satisfaction. "What news from Raisa Abramovna?" 

Lilia shrugged, momentarily at a loss. He asked her this every time, as if he expected to hear something new. It wasn't like dinner with the Feltsman family, where you could stay for two hours and only begin to come to grips with the latest family news. Only today there actually was something to say – and yet she felt she couldn't begin to express it.

"I told you that you should have worn snow boots!" he added, looking at the sopping wet shoes she'd left neatly by the door. "You'll catch cold!"

"My mother died," said Lilia.

Yakov stared at her, both shoes and skates forgotten. "Your...?"

"My mother in Magadan."

"Lilechka," he said slowly, an invocation of sympathy in three simple syllables. He reached out to caress her shoulder, then let his hand fall again. "When is the funeral?"

"Next week," she said. "But of course I'm not going."

Yakov frowned. A line was beginning to etch itself across the middle of his forehead. It only showed itself when his expression was disapproving. Like now. 

"You're not going?"

"I... no. To _Magadan_? Now?"

"But it's your mother," he said simply, as if it were all that needed saying.

"But it's not – you know it's not the same. I haven't seen her since I was thirteen. It's not like... if it was your mother, of course you would, but..."

A little twist of Yakov's face at the mention of his own mother. Could he really be offended? Perhaps Zelda Borisovna Feltsman wasn't actually immortal, but pointing this out might well seem sacrilegious to the rest of the Feltsman family.

" _Anyone's_ mother!" said Yakov, exasperated. "Lilia, honestly, I don't believe it, I don't understand you. She gave birth to you. How you could not even consider..."

Whatever small tremor might have shaken her when she first heard the news, whatever obscure ache of loss had tugged at her heart standing alone in her aunt's kitchen... all of that had washed away. All she could feel now was indifference and an increasing desire to win the argument.

"I hardly knew her anyway," she said, shrugging.

Yakov threw up his hands in defeat and turned away from her.

***

All evening they had very little to say to one another. Lilia made dinner and washed the dishes. Then she got out her sewing machine, along with a half-finished skirt that she'd left untouched for months, because sitting next to Yakov on the couch watching KVN made her itchy – and she couldn't think of anything else to do.

She sat at the table and sewed at a furious speed while Yakov stared at the television. Usually KVN had him laughing uproariously but tonight he was almost silent, even though the Boys from Baku were competing. Every so often she could sense, as much as see, him glancing tentatively in her direction, as if he thought she was something fragile, something breakable. She hated it. 

Distracted and smarting inside, she came very close to sewing across her own finger. She jerked her hand back, spit out an oath using words that her aunt would have been shocked to realise that she knew.

Now Yakov looked openly at her. "All right?"

"I'm _fine_ ," said Lilia, blinking tears of frustration from her eyes. "I'm just getting a headache. That show is stupid tonight. I'm going to bed now."

She lay in the dark, sleepless, until Yakov came to join her a couple of hours later. He undressed in silence, climbed into bed beside her. He rolled over and took her into his arms, like he always did. He kissed her softly on the neck, a little gently. 

Lilia made a noise of demurral. It was, she thought, the first time she had ever said no to him. Yakov didn't kiss her again, but he didn't turn away from her either. Lilia lay silently beside him until he had fallen asleep: his arms loosening around her, the edge of a snore at the beginning of one indrawn breath. Only then did she free herself, get up, and pull her bathrobe around her.

She needed some fresh air. After tucking cigarettes and lighter into her pocket alongside the keys, she quietly let herself out of the apartment and crept down the stairs. It was the dead of night. Outside the air had a bite of frost. Only a very few lights were showing in the surrounding apartment blocks, but the streetlights glowed all night, casting their pools of illumination with indiscriminate grace.

Lilia flicked her lighter, watched the little flame flicker for a moment in the wind. No, there was no wind. Her hand was trembling.

She stood in a corner of the courtyard, swathed in her coat and scarf, and cried until she thought a pile of ice would begin to grow on the gritty pavement from her tears. Her mother, her mother. Her mother in Magadan.

And yet she was a ghost. It was another country. It was a long time ago and it never happened anyway. What – Lilia asked herself finally, sniffling fiercely – could it possibly have to do with her?

That was the night that Lilia left her mother behind, as her mother had once left her.


	9. Chapter 9

Spring finally came, even to Moscow. The sun was warm on Lilia's face when she walked to the bus on her way to morning class. Thin spring leaves were budding on the fruit trees that had been planted in the courtyard, grass began to clothe the raw mud of their new neighborhood, the last bits of snow were melting in dark corners. Yakov was beside her every morning and every night. She ought to have been overcome with delight – but she wasn't.

In a few months the Bolshoi company would be travelling to France on tour, with Lilia among them. If only, if only...

Sitting at her new kitchen table, she laboured for hours over the autobiography that she had to write for her exit visa application, giving it more attention than she had never given to her scrappy, careless schoolgirl essays. She scrutinized each fact and clause and punctuation mark, wondering whether this would be the one to betray her. Clutching the pen, her hand – so pliant and expressive with its gestures when moulded by Galina Sergeyevna in rehearsal – cramped painfully.

"Are you still working on that?" said Yakov, leaning over her to glance at the page. She wished he wouldn't. "You're twenty, but you're writing an autobiography fit for an Old Bolshevik!"

"Please go away," said Lilia, biting back anything more imperative. "You know I have to get this right."

Yakov grumbled some incomprehensible complaint, but for once he went away without arguing with her.

Once she had finally delivered her autobiography to the administrator's office at the Bolshoi, letting the final typewritten copy slip reluctantly from her fingertips, she still had to prepare for her interview with the travel commission of the district party committee.

Here Yakov came into his element. As he confidently told her, he had been acing these interviews ever since he traveled to Geneva in 1962 for the European Figure Skating Championships. 

"It would have been West Berlin in '61, but that winter was so warm that we didn't have enough ice to train! It was terrible. I've never been so disappointed in my life."

Lilia had no time for Yakov's feelings about bad ice. She was no more inclined to waste time with his anecdotes than she was to stand around chattering in morning class. Her own interview was coming up in less than a week. She had to prepare. She brewed up a samovar of strong tea and lit a cigarette and sat down across the kitchen table from him.

"Go on," she said, trying to imagine her young and handsome husband as a humorless, doctrinaire Party official with a combover and glasses as thick as the bottom of a bottle. "Ask me anything. Show me how it goes."

Yakov took her at her word. He let fly with a relentless volley of questions about the Non-Aligned Movement and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty until Lilia finally shook her head, frustrated and bewildered.

"You're not being fair," she protested. 

She suspected him of trying to make some sort of point. Perhaps he was just angry that she hadn't been more sympathetic about the unseasonably warm winter of 1961.

"I would think you'd address the chair of the travel commission of the District Party Committee with a little more respect," observed Yakov, tapping the ash from his cigarette into the ashtray. 

"Yasha, you know what I mean! You're being unreasonable. They can't expect me to know all this. No one would ever leave the country if they did."

"You have to be ideologically prepared when you travel abroad. Foreign journalists are like mosquitos: once they taste blood, they never stop biting. Oleg Petrovich says..."

"Oleg Petrovich!" exclaimed Lilia. "Maybe you should have married him instead of me!"

Yakov ignored this, as it deserved. "Trust me, I know how they ask the questions! Do you have any idea how many times I've been to these interviews? This is exactly what they do, you just have to learn the technique..."

" _Technique_? You're getting a qualification to coach _figure skating_ , Yasha, not a doctorate in international relations! You don't know everything!"

He was offended. "Well, if you don't want my help, I have better things to do with my time."

They didn't speak to each other for the rest of the afternoon. Yakov stomped around the apartment showily carrying a textbook about the international politics of sport but not actually reading it, then slammed the apartment door behind him and went out without saying a word about where he was going. Lilia decided to make stew and started fiercely chopping up all the vegetables she could find in the cupboard. Standing in front of a board full of onions, she wiped a strand of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand and regretted every choice she had made in her life. Especially the onions. 

_What if I fail my interview with the District Party Committee because I didn't listen to him?_ she thought, her eyes burning as tears streamed down her face. _What if I throw away the whole tour because I was too proud to apologise? Aunt Raisa will say 'I told you so.' But I can't apologise to him, I can't! It'll make him insufferable, he already thinks he knows everything. I can't let him treat me like that – I won't!_

But that wasn't even the worst of it. _Maybe he won't come back,_ she found herself thinking. _Maybe he's already decided that he's had enough of me._

And what would she do then? It would be her fault and everyone would know: her aunt, all her fellow dancers, anyone who mattered. _It would never have lasted,_ they would say, _he was far too good for her._ Not even half a year of marriage. She would have to defect to France simply to escape the shame. And then... and then she would never see him again. Lilia swallowed hard, trying to drive away the lump that had begun to gather in her throat.

Such a small sound, the key turning in the lock. It had an almost infuriating nonchalance about it. 

Yakov came in and started wandering around the kitchen behind her as if nothing whatsoever had happened. She could hear his breathing, slightly ragged, as if he'd come up the three flights of stairs to their apartment at a rapid pace. A scent of new sweat hung in the air about him. Probably he had gone out running. He smelled amazing.

"I'm making stew," she said, her back straight and forbidding.

"I know," he said. "I can see that. I'm not blind."

Lilia didn't know what to say. She didn't turn her head. She sniffled a little despite herself. 

"It's the onions," she said in explanation.

Yakov looked incredulously at the pile on the chopping board, which was so high that it threatened to spill off onto the counter. "You did all of them? We had three in the cupboard! No, four! Well, I hope you like onions!"

Now he was even going to tell her how to cook. Lilia thought he should count his blessings that she hadn't buried her kitchen knife in his heart. She put it down on the counter and swallowed hard, letting her head fall forward. There was a long silence, only a slight creak of the floor as Yakov shifted his weight.

Instinctively she knew that he was close. Every fine hair on the back of her neck stood on end. A moment later she felt his arms around her waist, his nose nuzzling against her ear. Her whole body filled with an overflowing longing.

"Lilechka," he said. "Lilechka."

She wasn't going to breathe a word of apology. Neither was he, apparently. But she turned towards him and threw herself into his arms. 

_He's still mine,_ she thought with giddy triumph, a feeling of dawning power that could only be compared to what she felt when she stood on the stage of the Bolshoi to acknowledge an audience already on their feet. _He still loves me, he's mine._

That night Yakov ate her stew for dinner. Even though it was more onions than anything else, he asked for a second helping.

***

It felt as if she was walking through the remaining days on the tips of her toes, always balancing, never relaxing out of a high demi-pointe, never allowing the flat of her feet to touch the earth. It would have been easier if that had been what she had to do. At least then she would have known for certain what was expected of her.

Lilia somehow stumbled through her brief interview with the District Party Committee. They were just as stern and humorless as she had expected, but ultimately more forgiving. Although their commitment to ideological rectitude was obvious, their questioning was not quite as searching – or was she fooling herself? – as Yakov's had been. At one point she thought she heard a woman trade union officer say in an undertone to the chair, "but after all she's a ballet dancer..."

It was as if they actually wanted to send her abroad and were hoping that she wouldn't give them a reason to turn her down. Even so, she left the interview with her palms still damp with sweat, her skirt wrinkled where she had unconsciously been clutching at it with one hand.

After that came a resounding silence. All her papers had been submitted, her autobiography and character references and travel plans and her internal passport. She had gone to her party interview, and while she might not have impressed, at least the committee hadn't chosen to humiliate her. Now there was nothing to do but wait and see if she would be allowed to go. Lilia hated doing nothing.

Starved of any form of information, she began haunting the hallway outside the ballet administrator's office, both hoping and fearing that she might overhear something about the upcoming tour. All she heard was an extensive _contretemps_ about the final packing and shipping of the sets. A few days later she was treated to a long and inconclusive discussion how the next two weeks of rehearsals – which of necessity would be intense – could be timetabled to address various scheduling complaints communicated by the union of orchestral musicians.

Finally Lilia lost her patience, turned the doorknob, and went inside. The ballet administrator had brassy hennaed hair, two ashtrays, and two telephones on her desk. She switched from one to the other at will, often mid-conversation. The ceiling of her office was stained brown with cigarette smoke.

"Yes, Lilia Mikhailovna, we received all your papers," she said wearily. No doubt she had repeated the same thing a thousand times to a thousand other neurotic dancers. "Everything has been checked and submitted. It's being reviewed by the authorities now. You'll be informed if there are any questions."

"But I just," said Lilia, trying to remember what she had actually meant to ask, "I just wanted to make certain..."

"It's out of our hands now."

Lilia forced herself to take a breath. She knew very well that the final decision was a matter for the KGB. Perhaps the Minister of Culture would be involved. Perhaps, when it came to the very brightest stars in the Bolshoi's firmament, the ultimate responsibility might rest even higher yet.

"When the visas are issued," the ballet administrator continued mechanically, "we will hold the company's passports for safekeeping. Your foreign passport will be handed to you at the airport, at the appropriate time."

 _At the appropriate time._ Maybe never. Lilia bit her lower lip. From bitter experience with bureaucrats, she knew perfectly well that if she asked anything else, she would get exactly the same reply. All she would succeed in doing was making an enemy of the ballet administrator – if indeed she hadn't done this already.

So she only nodded and let herself out. The administrator was already trying to place yet another call. Lilia's mind was left no easier.

***

Lilia was so anxious that for days on end she couldn't bring herself to eat anything but porridge or drink anything but tea. She began to lose weight that she could ill afford to lose. Her shoulderblades became so prominent that she could easily reach back and slide her fingers underneath them.

"You're preparing for the trip," said the ballet mistress one morning with a curt nod. In the costume department they were less approving. When Lilia presented herself for a final fitting before everything was packed up for shipment to France, almost all of her costumes had to be taken in.

"I don't know why I bothered putting darts in this bodice," grumbled the seamstress through a mouthful of pins. "Your bust is nonexistent."

Lilia looked downwards. Of course it was true, not that Yakov had ever made any complaint. She shivered involuntarily, remembering the warmth of his mouth on her. This kept her from making an unkind observation about the woman's own generous endowment, which could charitably be described as 'relaxed.' It seemed that she didn't personally take advantage of the imported undergarments that she sold at an enormous mark-up. But it didn't do for a ballet dancer to alienate her seamstress, any more than her hairdresser.

How many people Lilia mortally offended during those weeks of painful suspense and anticipation, she would never know.

"Probably no more than usual," said Yakov with an entirely straight face.

For some reason (marvelled Lilia), he still loved her even though he lived with her, even though he had now come to know her. It was if he understood that she was trying to be a good wife, a good Komsomol girl, a good Soviet citizen, a good person – despite the fact that her efforts were often neither obvious nor successful.

On the night before she was due to depart, they went to bed early. This was partly because she had no performance that night, because the flight was early in the morning. It was because neither of them had any interest in sitting and staring at the walls. The evening news would have been even worse; Lilia was glad that Yakov hadn't tried to turn on _Vremya_. 

She was even more grateful to have him in bed; naturally she wasn't expecting to be able to sleep. They occupied themselves with other things. That night Yakov made love to her as if he might never see her again – which, not that they had discussed it in so many words, was of course untrue. Afterwards they held one another and said nothing at all, apart from incoherent words of love. Eventually Yakov drifted off to sleep.

Lilia lay awake until the morning.

***

Whatever Lilia might have imagined about the lifestyle of the international jet set, it was all rush and bother for the artists of the Bolshoi that morning. Two dancers had been late to their rendezvous at the theatre and then a bus had failed to start. So they arrived at Sheremetevo with people – not Lilia, obviously – standing in the aisles of the remaining buses.

After all that waiting, at the airport there was no ceremony, just the ballet company administrator standing in departures with a pile of thick envelopes that she had taken out of her shoulder bag, calling the roll in a weary voice. (She had been on the bus with them from the theatre; she could have done it on the bus!)

"Aitmatova... Antonov... Andreyushkin ... Baranovskaya... Bukin..."

Lilia had never been so grateful that her name came near the beginning of the alphabet. Even to have taken the name of 'Lilia Feltsman' would have meant an unbearable wait. She stepped forward and – with hands she willed not to tremble – received a red envelope on which her family name had been scrawled in an almost indecipherable cursive.

Inside... Lilia pulled out the foreign passport, flipped it impatiently open. Her own name, her own date of birth, her own photograph. It was terrible: her face as sour as if she'd just eaten a lemon, her small mouth slightly downturned at the corners. Her ears stood out. The intensity of the flash had made her look ten years older. Viewed from the standard of a publicity photograph, it was a disaster.

But the passport was hers, hers, hers. Lilia checked it at least every minute or two until she walked through passport control – her heart in her mouth – and then out onto the puddled tarmac. She would have kept looking at it on the plane, if the ballet administrator hadn't come down the aisle before takeoff and collected them all once again.

So she gazed out the window at a sea of clouds, smoking endless cigarettes, trying to guess when they would cross over into West Germany, and then finally into France itself. Wishing she had Yakov by her side.

***

Lilia behaved like a perfect angel; even her aunt couldn't have faulted her. 

Surrounded by the beauty and romance of Paris, itching to explore, she did as she had done her whole life and disciplined herself to think of nothing but ballet. Obediently she allowed herself to be shepherded from hotel to theater, from theater back to hotel. She spent her days rehearsing – tucked up under the eaves of the Palais Garnier like a little figure of a ballerina folded into a music box – and her evenings on stage. Every night, coming back to the Hotel Moderne, she stopped in the lobby and dutifully noted down the details of the typewritten schedule for the next day. Even if she had somehow forgotten the time for morning call, even if she had missed the inevitable knock on the door, she had a roommate to remind her.

They couldn't be expected to travel all the way to Paris without going sightseeing. Every Monday they were taken out: to the Eiffel Tower, to Notre Dame, to the Arc de Triomphe. Two buses full of Soviet dancers, all together, with their Soviet minders and their Soviet guides. Afterwards they were taken to a department store where everyone spent as much of their meagre per diem as they could scrape together. Lilia, who joined in avidly, was amazed that any department store in the world could stock enough tights, perfume and lipstick to satisfy the acquisitive desires of several dozen ballet dancers simultaneously.

They had been warned not to go anywhere alone. They were always under the eye of Western intelligence, just waiting to tempt them into some indiscretion that would reflect badly upon the reputation of the Soviet Union – not to mention their own reliability.

Of course they could go out independently if they really wanted. So Masha insisted. She and a few of the other _corps de ballet_ girls spent an afternoon in a café, not far from their hotel on the Place de la République, eking out single cups of tea under the disdainful eyes of the waiters and watching the world go by.

"You should come with us next time," said Masha to Lilia when they got back. But, unlike most ballet dancers, Lilia lacked the instinct to travel in flocks. She had seen them come in, all giggling together as if they thought they had gotten away with something, while their anonymous Russian companion in a suit and tie lingered outside to finish smoking his cigarette. She knew perfectly well that she wasn't free; she had no interest in pretending otherwise. It was far simpler and safer not to cause any trouble.

Yet no one could force her to lower her gaze. She claimed her place at the barre next to one of the great round windows of the Palace Garnier, and while her fellow dancers were taking their turns in morning class, she stared out across the rooftops of Paris. On the bus she ignored her seatmate and the excited chatter that floated across the aisle, raptly watching the drama of a city unfolding on the other side of the glass. Shop windows glowed like treasure boxes, signs and advertisements blazoned across buildings, cars and scooters were everywhere. 

While Lilia was envious of their elegant clothes, what struck her most was the relaxed confidence of the Parisians themselves, their beauty of movement as they strolled the streets or sat smoking and talking at the tables of the countless sidewalk cafés. There was something about the way they held themselves. Grandeur could be false, a bombastic facade masking a crumbling interior, but this sense of inner wellbeing could only be real.

When the bus was stopped at a red light she found herself admiring a young man in a black turtleneck who was walking nonchalantly hand in hand with his miniskirted girlfriend. He said something to her; she stopped and looked up at him; and he leaned over and kissed her full on the lips. And they carried on kissing passionately, right there on the sidewalk in front of everyone. Lilia's own mouth fell open with astonishment. They didn't hide their feelings, these Parisians; they didn't fear repression or the opinions of others. They just... loved.

She hadn't allowed herself to think too much about Yakov. During the day she was too caught up in her dancing; every night she would get back to the hotel after the performance with her mind still whirling, full to the brim with all she'd seen and done. Only in the small hours would she wake, emptied like an ebbing tide, and find herself conscious that she lay in bed alone. Yakov was thousands of kilometers away. If she had allowed herself to start missing him, she never would have stopped. 

Lilia watched the two Parisians kissing until the light changed. As the bus began to pull away, they were half screened by the boughs of a small tree. Then they slipped out of her sight entirely.

Someone across the aisle was trying to get her attention, something about Act III and a scene change, and she didn't know why on earth he was asking her. She ignored him.

"She thinks she's too good for us now," said a voice from behind her.

***

Perhaps it was true. Lilia's name was in all the papers. 

In the mornings she could do without breakfast – it cost hard currency better spent elsewhere – but she still went down to the hotel foyer early, half an hour before the call time, so that she could pore over the newspapers that were laid out for free on a low table by the stairs. She ignored the unloved breakfast buffet, and the low, tentative grumbling of her stomach. She ignored the men in suits who were already sitting and smoking over on the couches. Impatient, she opened Le Monde where it lay on the table, turned the pages quickly to the Culture section where she knew that a review would be waiting.

Even so, even in the unfamiliar Latin alphabet, she felt a shock of recognition when she found her own name. _La révélation de la tournée du Bolchoï est la jeune soliste Lilia Baranovskaya, qui n'a que vingt ans._

Lilia whispered the sentence to herself slowly and carefully, first in French and then in Russian, feeling the shape and weight of the words on her tongue. 'The revelation of the Bolshoi tour is the young soloist Lilia Baranovskaya, just twenty years old.'

She could not have claimed to be surprised; nor would she, if anyone had asked her. The previous night she had danced Juliet for the first time at the Palais Garnier – without her familiar claque of fans, with a foreign audience who might just as easily have come to bury as to praise her. Even above the orchestra music she had sensed a hushed awe descending across the two-thousand-seat theater when she began her first solo; then the applause beginning to break out here and there at the height of her jumps; then, finally, the dam-bursting torrent at the close. She'd had a standing ovation, the curtain parting again and again to allow her to acknowledge the crowd.

She felt the same way now, a fizzing in her bloodstream that made her feel she might fly – even if she wasn't entirely certain that she could stroll the streets of Paris by herself.

Lilia checked her watch. Ten minutes until the bus was due to depart. A few extravagant souls were sampling the breakfast buffet. More lounged around the foyer gossiping and offhandedly beginning their stretches. Glancing at the day's schedule on the notice board, Lilia blinked at an unexpected item.

 _16:00. Press conference, Hotel Moderne._ A list of the usual names followed: the artistic director, a leading choreographer, the prima ballerina, a representative from the Ministry of Culture. And finally one last name, unusual, unexpected. _Lilia Baranovskaya._

She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was the artistic director.

"They're interested in you, Baranovskaya. I hope you have something to say for yourself."

Lilia shook her head, temporarily at a loss. _Four o'clock,_ she thought. _I was going to have a nap._

***

Lilia wished that she had invested in a pair of sunglasses at the department store, because clearly Westerners were as profligate with their flashbulbs as they were with everything else. She sat at the far end of a long table, her legs tucked neatly and modestly behind a voluminous table skirt, and blinked at the assembled men of the press while lengthy questions and still lengthier answers were translated back and forth between French and Russian.

She was beginning to think that perhaps she had been invited along solely to round out the company, a decorative accent to be seen rather than heard. She had no particular objection to this. Although there had been a good deal of talking in the press conference, it seemed that no one had really said anything yet. It might be bad form to be the first.

At a certain point she began daydreaming about a butcher's shop she had seen on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, not so far from the hotel, which sold whole chickens freshly roasted on a spit. Extravagant, yes... but if she could persuade a few of the others... perhaps if divided between five or six... Her mouth began to water.

"Right," said the artistic director, "any questions for our Lilia Mikhailovna?"

A French journalist put his hand up immediately. "Madame Baranovskaya, have you been surprised by the warmth of the reception you've received from the audiences here in Paris?"

Just to be certain, Lilia waited for the translation into Russian, but the meaning was no different.

"No," she replied in French. "I know that I'm good." 

There were a few scattered chuckles at that. But what was she meant to have done – to pretend to be so ignorant, inexperienced or underconfident that she couldn't recognise what she saw when she looked in the mirror? Surely this wouldn't reflect well upon anyone. Besides that it was scarcely credible.

"The Bolshoi Ballet is the best in the world," added Lilia quickly, feeling nonetheless that her statement required some sort of context. "I have studied from Ulanova. And other great dancers."

What she ought to have said – and could easily have said in Russian, if it hadn't been for her own pride – was something along the lines of, _I'm always trying my best to live up to the expectations of the audience, and to be worthy of those who have come before me._ But this was too subtle a statement to be expressed, or even thought of, in her stumbling, schoolgirl French.

All that came to her mind, and her lips, in the end was: "Of course I try to be beautiful."

Another little _frisson_ ran around the room. A pleased one, she thought. 

The press conference concluded soon after that. One of the French journalist pushed his way forward and said something to her that she couldn't quite make out in all the hubbub of shifting chairs and photographic equipment being packed up. The man from Gosconcert came quickly to rescue her from this unauthorised interview attempt. It was only afterwards that Lilia actually realised what the journalist had been asking: _I understand that you're married to Yakov Feltsman, the Olympic figure skater. Has your husband traveled with you to Paris, Madame Baranovskaya?_

As they left the room, the artistic director patted her on the shoulder again. But what spoke most eloquently of her success was the glancing look of disapproval she received from the Bolshoi's _prima_ – who didn't speak a word of French, but surely had heard and understood the translation.

***

It was over so quickly. Almost without noticing, Lilia found herself at Charles De Gaulle with only thirty minutes left until their Aeroflot flight started boarding. She squandered the time in a series of airport shops, gazing at an extravagant profusion of goods whose like she would never see until she went abroad again.

In a newsagent she picked up a copy of _Paris Match_ and idly flipped through the pages, only to be confronted with a photograph of herself backstage at the Palais Garnier. She hardly remembered when it had been taken: the photographer had arrived at the end of the rehearsal and she, still in her practice tutu, had been asked to stay behind for a few minutes to pose amidst the rigging and assorted pieces of scaffolding. Well. Here was the result. He had almost managed to coax a smile out of her – which she certainly didn't remember, but proved that the man had some skill.

The headline was simple. _Lilia Baranovskaya: «Naturellement j'essaye d'être belle.»_

How typical of the press to pick the silliest thing she'd said at that press conference. At least her French had been correct.

Lilia lingered for a moment with the magazine in her hand but in the end she didn't buy it. Even if she hadn't already calculated her budget for foreign purchases down to the last _centime_ , who would choose to go home with a magazine when they could buy another pair of nylons? She knew what she looked like, after all.

***

She slept for the whole of the flight, better than she had in months. She woke only when they made the announcement that the plane was starting its descent, jerking awake with a jolt of homesickness, nostalgia, claustrophobia and anticipation all mixed together. Staring out the window at the brand new tower blocks marching across the Moscow landscape, looking for her own apartment, she found it difficult to believe that Yakov was down there somewhere waiting for her. It was almost unbelievable that he existed at all: both her husband and the whole city of Paris could have been fevered dreams born in her mind as she circled above the clouds.

The wait at Sheremetevo was unbearable. There was a crush at passport control, all the members of the Bolshoi company pressing forwards at once, and only a couple of border guards on duty. _Why is everyone so eager to get back?_ wondered Lilia, shoving her way into a small gap, already forgetting the way her heart had expanded at her first breath of cool Russian air on the tarmac – even though it had been faintly perfumed with jet fuel.

At customs there was another long hold up, piles of bags to be opened and checked one by one. The customs officer looked dubiously into Lilia's suitcase, a nice leather one that she'd borrowed from Yakov rather than bringing the suitcase that her aunt had bought for her on her sixteenth birthday, which was made of fabric-covered plywood. He pushed aside a dress and frowned at what was revealed.

"Not even my wife could go through this many pairs of tights," he said.

Lilia gave him a withering look. "Your wife clearly isn't a ballet dancer."

And this representative of the great Soviet state actually colored slightly. In the end he gave up, waving her onwards with an air of not wanting to see any more of her or her Parisian tights. He left her to close up the suitcase herself.

Of course that wasn't the end of it. Other people's luggage was still under scrutiny, and no one would be allowed to continue into arrivals until the whole company was cleared. Masha, with her three overpacked suitcases, was remonstrating with an implacable border guard about...  
Lilia didn't even care what it was about. It was holding her up. 

Impatient, she lit a cigarette and stared fixedly at the door marked 'Exit.' Could Yakov really be standing just on the other side, waiting for her there? Five weeks earlier he'd promised that he would be, but that had been five weeks ago. Since then they'd spoken only once, over a line so bad that she'd only really been able to recognise his voice by the distinctive note of his full-volume indignation. Of course she'd written to him – letters a good deal less informative than the ones she'd written during their courtship – but she had no confidence that any of them had arrived in his hands yet. Anything at all could have happened in five weeks. Or even in the two hours since their plane had landed.

"Come on!" said the ballet administrator, as if all of them had simply been malingering.

Into the arrivals hall. For a moment Lilia's heart thumped a warning: she couldn't see Yakov anywhere amidst the piles of luggage and newly arrived tour groups already proving a burden to their minders. A moment later she spotted him towards the far side, looking up as the flow of new arrivals caught his attention. He was just stubbing out his cigarette.

It would have been undignified to run across the room and throw herself into his arms, even if she had done it on demi-pointe. So she walked, attempting to maintain a sort of swanlike composure even while carrying a heavy suitcase in one hand. Yakov covered the rest of the distance with a few businesslike strides and took the suitcase from her.

"You're still here," she said.

"Where else would I have gone?" replied Yakov wryly.

How she wished that he would kiss her as she'd seen the Parisians kissing, full and unashamed, but it was impossible. They were grown, married people, not teenagers, and this was the Soviet Union. Besides, they were public figures. People would stare.

So she tried to content herself with gazing at him. Even grasping a suitcase handle rather than a scythe or a red flag or a rifle, even wearing a leather jacket and a turtleneck rather than a chest full of medals, he was the very figure of a Soviet hero, square-jawed and clear-eyed. She could have stepped out of the airport building and looked up to find him striding across a mosaic on the facade entitled Forward to Socialism. 

Of course, a stickler might have noted that he'd put on a little bit of weight since she'd been gone.

"Well, I can tell you haven't been skating," said Lilia, who was nothing if not a stickler.

"I can tell you missed me," said Yakov.

But there must have been a note of something in her eyes, because he put down the suitcase and pulled her quickly into his arms. He smelled of cologne and leather and Bulgarian tobacco. If he'd wanted to make love to her right there, on the floor of the arrivals hall, Lilia felt that she wouldn't have resisted. Desire flooded through her whole body.

All she could say was "Yasha."

"I missed _you_ ," he said into her ear before releasing her again.

At even that small separation, Lilia felt tears pricking her eyes. Swept up in the excitement of performing in Paris, she had at times been afraid that she hadn't missed him enough. Now she knew that she had missed him more than she could ever admit. She had become used to him so quickly; now it was impossible to imagine coming home without him.

Still, her aunt's words echoed in the back of her mind. _A strong person forgets the past. A strong person can be reborn as many times as necessary._

A daughter of enemies of the people, Lilia had learned her lesson well. Nothing is safe forever. The last fall of the curtain, the train pulling out of the station. No one knows what the future may hold. Always be prepared to say goodbye.

To have fallen in love with Yakov, and know herself to be loved by him, could not have been more wonderful. It also could not have been more terrifying – because she knew deep in her soul that, sooner or later, fate would force her to let him go too. 

Looking down, Lilia released her husband's hand and followed him out of the airport terminal.


End file.
